The philosophy of Nietzsche; an exposition and an appreciation

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

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The Philosophy
of Nietzsche :

AN EXPOSITION AND AN
a: X, APPRECIATION a: :x.

BY

GEORGES CHATTERTON-HILL, Ph.D.

PRIVATDOCENT OF SOCIOLOGY AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF GENEVA

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

MCMXIII

THE L/SRARy

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CONTENTS

BOOK I.— CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

CilAPTER

I. The Life of Nietzsche
II. General View of Nietzsche's Ideal

III. The State ....

IV. The Moral Law
V. The Religions

VI. Science. ....

BOOK II.— POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY

I. The Will of Power as Fundamental Postulate

II. The Theory of Knowledge as expressive of the
Will of Power ....

III. The Moral Systems — Masters and Slaves

IV. The Over-Man ....

V. Nietzsche and Max Stirner

VI. The Value of Nietzsche

VII. Conclusion .....

9

S6

73

90

114
138

149

164
184
217

239
252
286

PREFACE

The manuscript of this book was written as long ago
as 1905. Seven years constitute a long period in the
life of a young author. Since this manuscript was
written, other work has been composed and has
seen the light of day, amongst it being my books on
''Heredity and Selection in Sociology," and *'The
Sociological Value of Christianity," and various
essays. During seven years an author must inevit-
ably go through various phases of mental evolution,
he cannot fail to be influenced by the numerous
books and persons with whom he comes in contact,
and to have his horizon constantly enlarged thereby.
I cannot say, therefore, that the point of view from
which I judged things seven years ago is the same as
that from which I judge them to-day.

For certain reasons the manuscript was not
published at the time, and since then my attention
has been taken up with other work. But now,
following advice which has been tendered me, I have
decided to publish it, without changing anything
except a few unimportant details.

The book is as objective as possible — that is to say,
I have endeavoured to place as clearly as I can the
philosophy of Nietzsche before the reader, without
putting forward my own opinions. It is Nietzsche's
thought, and Nietzsche s thought alone, which is
exposed here. It is impossible, however, when
exposing the thought of another, to be oneself wholly
and completely silent ; my views may consequently
da

6 6 PREFACE

be found to have expressed themselves more than
I should have wished, and more than it was my
intention to have given expression to them. Should
these views be found, by those who may have read
other work of mine, not to be in harmony with the
ideas developed in such other work, the explanation
of this apparent anomaly is to be sought in the fact
that the present book was written seven years ago,
as mentioned above.

If this book can, in the slightest degree, help any-
one, among the English-speaking public, to a stronger
admiration for, and a better comprehension of, the
most recent of the really great Masters of European
thought ; if it should succeed in inciting anyone to
study more deeply, and therefore to appreciate more
fully, that magnificent German culture, illustrated
by the names of so many immortal thinkers, poets
and artists, to which modern civilisation owes so
immense a debt ; the author may, perhaps, be par-
doned for venturing to lay before the reader the
present work.

My sincere gratitude is due to M. Henri Lichten-
berger, Professor of German Literature at the
University of Paris, and author of that admirable
introduction to the study of Nietzsche's thought.
La Philosophie de Nietzsche, which has had such great
success in making Nietzsche known and appreciated
in France. Professor Lichtenberger most kindly
read my manuscript, besides rendering me other
valuable assistance.

G. C.-H.

Geneva, November 191 2.

BOOK I

CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Tag meines Lebens !

Gen Abend geht's.

Schon gliiht Dein Auge

halbgebrochen,

Schon quillt Deines Thau's

Thranengetrausel,

Schon lauft still iiber weisse Meere

Deiner Liebe Purpur,

Deine letzte zogernde Seligkeit. . . .

Dies ist der Herbst : der — bricht Dir noch das Herz !
Fliege fort ! fiiege fort 1

Nietzsche.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF
NIETZSCHE

CHAPTER 1

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche himself has said of Schopenhauer that
he was the last German to enjoy an international
reputation. The same remark may, however, more
fitly be made of Friedrich Nietzsche himself. The
powerful mind of Nietzsche has exercised an influence
in Europe which it would be difficult to overestimate.
During the last ten years the philosophy and letters
of the Continent have been under the hypnotism of
that gospel of life in all its plenitude and energy which,
preached under the attractive form of aphorisms,
vigorous and apodictical, has broken loose from the
trammels of the dogmatic school which had dominated
the world of Western thought since Immanuel Kant.
In Germany the philosophy of Nietzsche has
given birth to a literature abundant in quantity and
varying in quality. In France it has attracted the
attention of all thinking circles and has become, as
M. Ferdinand Brunetiere remarks in the first volume
of his '' Discours de Combat,'' the '' philosophic a la
mode.'' M. Emile Faguet, M. Alfred Fouillee,
M. Eugene de Roberty, M. Henri Lichtenberger,
have contributed valuable works to the Nietzsche
bibliography. In England something like a dozen

9

10 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

books have been devoted to the hfe and teachings of
the German philosopher, notably those of Mr T.
Common, Mr A. M. Ludovici, Mr J. M. Kennedy,
Dr Miigge, and Mr A. R. Orage ; while a translation
of the whole of his works has been issued in eighteen
substantial volumes under the editorship of Dr
Oscar Levy. The first half of the official biography,
written in German by Mrs Forster-Nietzsche, has
recently been published in an English translation,
and it is understood that the other part is to follow
shortly. It is, however, regrettable that an even
wider knowledge should not have been obtained of
a doctrine which, whatever may be the views taken
as to its fundamental principles, has exercised an
invigorating and revivifying influence on the whole
domain of philosophic thought ; and which, by
calling in question the very basis of an almost
universally accepted ethical creed — by calling in
question the legitimacy of the moral law itself — has
brought us face to face with those fundamental
problems which every philosopher from Socrates
onwards has sought to solve. Hitherto, with very
few and almost unknown exceptions, every school
of philosophy has been agreed on the fact that a
universal moral law exists ; the differences of opinion
arose as to the precise basis on which the categorical
imperative could be grounded. Max Stimer was,
we believe, the first to deny the existence of the
categorical imperative altogether, and to preach
the gospel of immoralism. But, even in spite of the
persevering efforts of Mr Mackay, the name of Stirner
remains unknown to the vast majority of men. It
was the gospel preached with lyrical enthusiasm by
Zarathustra - Nietzsche which first called general
attention to the fact that serious reasons exist for

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 11

preferring the immoral to the moral, the untrue to
the true.

It has often been objected with regard to Nietzsche
that the numerous contradictions which are to be
found scattered through his works themselves, pre-
clude any attempt to systematise his philosophy.
To this it may be replied that all, or almost all, these
contradictions are capable of being resolved in the
light of the master-thought which pervades all his
writings ; and, indeed, that philosopher who is often
held up as a model in respect of consistency, Kant
himself, is by no means free from contradiction in the
pages of the '' Critique of Pure Reason " ; which fact
does not prevent us from recognising Kant as the
founder of a very fruitful and important system of
philosophy. But with regard to Nietzsche, it may i
also be urged that he never intended his work to|
be regarded as a coherent and consistent '' system. ''|
It does not appear that Nietzsche ever endeavoured
to deduce any sociological conclusions from his philo-
sophical premises. The philosophy of Nietzsche, in
the eyes of its author, was the expression of a per-
sonality, of a character, of a temperament. We are
therefore quite justified in endeavouring to system-
atise the writings and teachings of Nietzsche, in
examining that teaching in the light of biological
fact and sociological reality, in applying it to the
solution of the fundamental problems of philosophy
and of sociology ; but we should be committing a
grave error if, in studying Nietzsche, we should make
abstraction of the personality of the author. That
personality reveals itself in every line, in every aphor-
ism. If the work of Nietzsche is characterised by one
fundamental doctrine : the belief in life in all its

12 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

plenitude and power — which serves as a clue to the
systematisation of his philosophy — it is also character-
ised by one fundamental feature : the sincerity and
heroism of the writer's nature, which serves as a guide
to the comprehension of his personality. And, as we
have said, the personality of Nietzsche is intimately
bound up with his philosophy.

Sincerity and heroism, we have said, are the two
characteristics of Nietzsche's personality. To these
qualities should be added a third — delicacy of senti-
ment and refinement of taste. These characteristics
give us the clue to his rupture with Wagner, to the
apparent brutality of his language, to his hatred of the
democratic and plebeian movement, to his enthusiastic
worship of art as the raison-d'etre and object of life,
to his detestation of the Christian religion. '' All
or nothing," was his motto, and he lived up to it.
Gifted, as we have said, with an extraordinary refine-
ment of sentiment and taste ; having set himself as
an ideal Life itself, and Life in beauty, in plenitude,
in power, in exuberance of wealth ; he was determined
to be sincere with himself at all and every cost, to
examine every ideal, however ancient, however sacred
its traditions, however universal its acceptance; to
examine it to the bottom, to reject it if necessary, at
whatever cost of friendship or of suffering to himself ;
to affirm and reaffirm his ideal, that ideal which he
held to be true ; to affirm and reaffirm it in the face
of the whole world if necessary, without compromise.
To be able to do this — to be able to attack and reject
all that which mankind has hitherto, by almost
universal acceptance, held sacred ; to be able to
sacrifice all those ideas which tradition and education
have rendered personalty of value ; to be able to
sacrifice friends that one loves and venerates on the

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 13

altar of one's convictions — to do this requires courage
above the ordinary : it requires heroism.

Refinement of taste is the third great characteristic
of Nietzsche. The standard by which he judges of
every ideal, whether in morality or in religion — which
is morality in a higher potency — or in art, or in the
intimacy of daily life, is its '' Vornehmheit,'' its
elegance, its good taste, its aesthetic qualities. Nietz-
sche is essentially an artist. He is more an artist than
a thinker ; or rather his career as thinker is subor-
dinated to his artistic propensities. And when we say
of Nietzsche that he was an artist, we do not mean that
he was a mere poet, or a mere musical composer —
although he wrote some very delightful verses and was
an excellent appreciator of music, if not a profound
one — but we mean that his whole conception of life
was an artistic conception ; and even as he regarded
the cosmological process in its entirety as an aesthetical
manifestation of the universal Will of which life and
the world and thought are composed, he also con-
sidered all the details of existence in their relation
to his standard — a very high standard — of artistic
value.

Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844, at Rocken, in
Germany. Left fatherless at the age of five, he emi-
grated with his family in 1850 to Naumburg, where his
first studies were undertaken. In 1858, at the age of
fourteen, he entered the school at Schulpforta as a
pupil, an institution which counted Klopstock, Fichte,
Schlegel, von Ranke, among its former students.
After leaving school he studied at Bonn (1864-1865)
and at Leipzig (1865-1867) . From an early age he had
developed a liking and an aptitude for general culture,
as opposed to that speciaHsm which manifested itself

14 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

already in the sixties and which tends to increase with
every advance of modern civiUsation. Confronted
with the difficulty of choosing a career when entering
the university, he selected philology as his speciaUty ;
and in 1869, before even he had defended the thesis
necessary to the obtaining of the degree of doctor at
the University of Leipzig, we find him nominated to
the post of Professor of Philology at the University of
Bale.

Nietzsche's career up till now had been uneventful.
He and his sister, now Frau Forster-Nietzsche, were
the only two children. The account which his sister
gives of these early years shows Nietzsche to have been
already in boyhood of a singularly thoughtful and
serious disposition. His father was the Protestant
pastor of Rocken, his native village, and Nietzsche
was brought up in an atmosphere which, without
being bigoted or austere, was deeply religious. This
early education was destined to influence profoundly
the whole life of the philosopher. However violently
he may have later on broken loose from Christianity,
however bitterly he may have criticised the faith of his
forefathers, Nietzsche's remained always an essenti-
ally religious nature. The man who imagined himself
to have effected the most complete separation with
the past, who proclaimed at all times and in all
places that '' God is dead,'' that he was beyond and
above all religion and all supernatural belief, that
same man proved, by his worship of truth, by his
fearless and intrepid sincerity, by his idealisation of
life, that he was ever actuated by the most deeply
religious principles. Certainly he was far above all
churches and all religions ; but, if he emphatically
repudiated belief in an anthropomorphic God, he
believed in Life, in Life as a manifestation of Beauty ;

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 15

he believed in principles, and he lived up to his
principles.

In 1869, therefore, we find Nietzsche occupying the
chair of philology at Bale. At Leipzig, as the pupil
of Ritschl, he had devoted himself to the study of
the Greek language and literature. From thence
onwards he was a passionate lover of Greek life, of
Greek art, of Greek philosophy. His study of that
ancient and glorious civilisation revealed Nietzsche
to himself. It brought to his knowledge a culture
and an ideal which seemed to correspond most nearly
to the ideal which he had already evoked of life. This
search for himself, as we may call it, this endeavour
to discover, in contact with the outer world, that ideal
which was also his, or which was as near to his as
possible, was destined to prove a painful, but very
salutary, experience for Nietzsche.

From earliest boyhood upwards, we find Nietzsche's
temperament deeply tinged with that aristocratism
which is so characteristic a feature of his philosophy.
He claimed always, whether rightly or not we know
not, to be descended from the Polish race, from a
family of Nietzky, which is said to have sought shelter
in Germany towards the beginning of the eighteenth
century from the religious persecutions directed
against Protestants in Poland. '' A Count Nietzky
does not tell lies," Nietzsche used to say proudly to his
sister when yet a boy ; and this sentence gives us the
clue to his aristocratic, extraordinarily refined and
sensitive character. His breach with orthodoxy seems
to have been effected gradually, without violent
emotions. But that he was deeply conscious of the
importance of the step which he took in abandoning
Christianity is shown by several passages in his
writings. The separation of Nietzsche from Chris-

16 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

tianity was in any case inevitable. His was too
powerful a genius to be able to confine itself within
the narrow domain of a dogmatic creed ; and the ideal
of Christianity — of primitive Christianity — is the
diametrical opposite of Nietzsche's ideal, which was
also the ideal of the Greeks of the heroic age, and of
the Romans before the disruption.

Nietzsche's search for himself, as we have called
it, led him to explore vast fields of culture. His was
ever a synthetical mind, to which the minute and
detailed analysis of the scientist was repugnant. He
had a natural aptitude for music and poetry, an apti-
tude which harmonised with the delicacy and refine-
ment of his nature. He had an aptitude for literature,
for philosophy ; he had the curiosity of new details,
of adventurous research ; and above all he had an
inborn love of life, of beauty, of strength ; and the life
which is strong and beautiful, which manifests itself
in all its integrity, which goes out conquering and to
conquer, was the life which Nietzsche recognised as
the ideal life.

As a consequence it ensued that all the manly
virtues — courage, strength, purity, love of adventure,
love of hardship and privation, even ferocity — were,
in Nietzsche's eyes, above value. He had a natural
repugnance for the Christian virtues of humility,
gentleness, love, forgiveness — in a word, feminism.
Beauty — Art — were the raison-d'etre of life, its
justification ; and beauty was synonymous with
strength, with courage, with Power. The man who
is strong and courageous and powerful is the justi-
fication of humanity. And such a man naturally
detests those qualities which tend to minimise his
strength and to undermine his power, such quahties,
for instance, as humihty and gentleness.

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 17

Life = Beauty
Beau ty= Power
/. Life = Power

Such was the syllogism which Nietzsche probably
posed at a very early age. The question which now
presented itself was : Such an ideal, has it ever
existed, has it ever constituted the gospel, if not of
humanity, at all events of a powerful and ruling race
which dominates humanity ?

His philological studies led Nietzsche to obtain
a more profound knowledge of the ancient Hellenic
world. And his study of Hellenic philosophy, of
Hellenic art, of Hellenic poetry, and above all of the
Hellenic drama, convinced him that the Hellenes of
the pre-Socratian era had realised an ideal which
corresponded to his own ; that the ancient Hellenic
culture was a culture in which life was regarded as
synonymous with Beauty, and in which the vague
mass of humanity was regarded as the basis for the
establishment of a superior race, of a race which was
the incarnation of the Will of Power, of a race whose
object was to create beauty, and whose existence
was the justification of the world.

Such was Nietzsche's conception of the Hellenic
ideal, as revealed in Homer, in iEschylus, in Anaxi-
mander, in Pythagoras. It may have been right and
it may have been wrong. But certain it is that this
discovery, as Nietzsche considered it, of the secret of
Greek civilisation, roused him to intense enthusiasm.
Henceforth he was to judge of everything in the light
of that ancient Greek ideal.

When Nietzsche came to Bale, in 1869, Richard
Wagner was living in his retreat at Tribschen.
Nietzsche was soon on intimate terms with the creator
of Tristan, and very frequently visited Wagner in his

18 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

home on the Lake of Lucerne. This friendship
between Nietzsche and Wagner was one of the most
important, as it was also one of the most beautiful,
events in the lives of both masters. One must go
back to the friendship of Goethe and Schiller in order
to find a parallel for the friendship of the musician and
the philosopher. Nietzsche was roused to enthusiasm
by Wagner's work. He saw in Wagner the reviver of
Greek tragedy, the modern successor of iEschylus.
A further meeting-ground in common was the philo-
sophy of Schopenhauer. The great pessimist of
Frankfurt had exercised a very great influence on
Wagner, an influence which reveals itself especially
in Tristan and Isolde. No less was the influence
he exercised on Nietzsche. The latter first became
acquainted with '' The World as Will and Repre-
sentation/' in 1865, by an accident. From the first
he was struck by the immense perspective opened out
by this masterpiece, as well as by the remarkable
personality of the author which shows itself in these
pages. Nietzsche saw in Schopenhauer, and saw
rightly, the destroyer of that happy and absurd
optimism of which David Friedrich Strauss was the
then representative, and which still reigns supreme
to-day in certain circles, in which the qualities
formerly attributed to an anthropomorphic deity have
been transferred to the abstract entity called Reason.
From his study of Greek drama, Nietzsche had
drawn the conclusion that two states of mind were
ever present to the Greeks of the heroic era. The
contemporaries of ^schylus were no mere optimists,
believing in the ordered and harmonious governance
of the universe. They were not afraid of the sight
of all the pain and suffering that are the necessary
accompaniments of the world-process. They were

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 19

strong enough, and brave enough, and powerful
enough, and sufficiently sure of their power, to be able,
not only to view the sight of the world's sufferings
with complacency, but to wish for the spectacle, to
enjoy the spectacle as an aesthetic vision, to enjoy it as
a reminder of the reality of things, as an instrument
for giving them conscience of their power, as an
instrument for realising their power. Greek tragedy
was the visible symbol of this feeling of invincible
power in the face of suffering and pain ; it was in
order to have the spectacle of the eternal struggle
constantly evoked, constantly placed before them,
that the Greeks had recourse to the tragedy. Only he
who is strong enough to be able to surmount suffering,
who is conscious of being superior to suffering, of
being above it, can afford constantly to have evoked
before his eyes scenes representing all that is most
bitter, all that is most cruel, in the history of human
nature and the world.

What was the secret of this power of the Greeks,
which rendered them not merely indifferent to the
sight of suffering, but which enabled them to regard
suffering as an aesthetic manifestation of the universal
Will-process which constitutes the world ? That
secret Nietzsche saw in those two states of mind to
which we have referred above. The Greeks, first of
all, possessed the faculty of creating an ideal vision of
the world as it should be, a vision which enabled them
to escape from the tyranny of Being, which enabled
them to regard suffering as the necessary means to
the attainment of their ideal. The Olympian gods
are the fruit of this ecstatic state of mind, the ApoUin-
ian, as Nietzsche termed it. The deities of Olympia
were creations of beauty, whose existence inspired
the Greeks with a consciousness of their own creative

20 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

power, which opened out to them an endless perspec-
tive of the possibihties to be achieved by that creative
power, which represented an ideal of supreme beauty
and power and strength, whose beauty, power and
strength alone sufficed to justify all the pain and all
the tears and all the suffering necessary to create that
radiant vision. In the ApoUinian state of mind, when
confronted by the beauty of that radiant vision
which reflected his own strength and his own power,
because his strength and his power had created it,
man uplifted himself above the cares and worries of
existence and exclaimed : '' Life, I love thee, I desire
thee, for thou are beautiful and glorious, and thy
beauty and thy glory do but represent the infinite
possibilities of my strength and power/'

In the second place, the Greeks possessed the
faculty of elevating themselves above the narrow
limits in which individual life is contined, and of con-
templating Life as a whole, in its eternity, above and
beyond the fact of individuation, above and beyond
the flux and reflux of phenomena. In this state of
mind, the Dionysian, they took conscience of the
identity of all lives in the one universal Life, they
broke down the barriers which the fact of individua-
tion had set up, and saw only one universal life-
process in its eternity, manifesting itself in the fact of
individuation, but superior to it, because confined
within no limits, because universal and unchanging
and eternal. In the Dionysian state of mind, be-
coming conscious of the identity of his individual life
with all life, with the whole of nature, with the eternal
world-process itself, man exclaimed : '' Life, I love
thee, I desire thee, for thou art eternal."

Thus the Greeks were neither pessimists nor
optimists ; they were above both pessimism and

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 21

optimism ; for them pessimism and optimism ceased
to be, and were confounded in a higher state, in an
ApoUinian and Dionysian, or rather in a state which
combined both the ApolUnian and Dionysian visions
of Ufe. This combination of ApoUinian and Dio-
nysian wisdom was reached in Greek tragedy, and
above all in the choir of satyrs, so much appreciated
by the Greeks. The satyr, of half-human, half-
animal creation, represented the return to nature,
to primitive savagery, where culture was unknown.
The choir of satyrs, by means of dancing and music,
roused the spectators to a condition of ecstatic frenzy
in which the identity of the whole of nature seemed to
be realised, in which the barriers artificially set up
by the fact of individuation were broken down ; and
at the same time, while the spectators were celebrating
the return to nature, and the eternity of nature, and
the identity of all nature, was communicated the
glorious and radiant vision of the god Dionysus,
offering himself to the assembled mass. Thus the
ApoUinian mystery celebrated by the choir of satyrs
gave birth to a Dionysian vision of the god, radiant
ideal above humanity. In this supreme moment
ApoUinian and Dionysian wisdom were confounded
in a common ecstasy.

The perusal by Nietzsche of Schopenhauer's
master-work must have convinced him that Schopen-
hauer was deeply impressed by the truth conveyed in
the ApoUinian vision. Schopenhauer's fundamental
thought is the essential identity of all life, as em-
anation of the universal and primordial Will, and the
highest wisdom is attained by him who, breaking
down the barrier set up by the fact of individuation,
raises himself above the sphere of phenomena
subjected to the law of sufficient reason, and realises

22 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

the identity of all life as confounded in the universal
Will of which the world of phenomena is the mani-
festation. Pursuing his investigations further, and
had he not been so exclusively devoted to Greek
philology, Nietzsche would have discovered that the
Eastern philosophy, from which Schopenhauer's
learned so much, enunciated the same idea quite
independently of the Greeks. " And Krishna says :
Know that this science alone is valid which affirms
an unique and eternal essence in all beings, the
undivided in the divided. For he does but see, he
who perceives all beings as like himself.'' ^

But the Apollinian vision of life, which was used by
the Greeks as a means of strengthening life, of adding
to its beauty, of celebrating its triumphs, was used
by Schopenhauer to an end diametrically opposite.
According to the philosopher of Frankfurt, it is only
when we have realised the universal solidarity which
binds us to the rest of nature that we are able to fully
fathom the depths of human suffering and human
desolation ; and the conception of the identity of all
life, celebrated by the Greeks in the choir of satyrs,
becomes, in the mind of Schopenhauer, the main
incitement to a total negation, not only of life, but of
all wish to live.

Nietzsche accepted the pessimism of Schopenhauer.
He, too, saw in the world-process a gigantic evil ;
he, too, could have repeated : '' Das Leben ist das
grosste Verbrechen." He saw in the philosophy
of Schopenhauer the salutary counterblast to the
" philistine optimism " ('' philisterhafter Optimis-
mus ") of which Strauss was the chief representative.
The optimist school saw in the world-process the work

^ " Bhagavata-Gita," chap, xviii. Cited in " Sanctuaires et
Paysages d'Asie," p. 158, by A. Chevrillon (Paris, 1905).

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 23

of an all-pervading Reason, which abstract entity
they substituted for the former anthropomorphic
deity. Nietzsche, following Schopenhauer, saw in the
world-process no trace of reason. For the disciple
as for the master the world is unjustifiable from the
point of view of pure reason. The one universal and
immutable law is that of fatality. To this view
Nietzsche always adhered. He never ceased to
proclaim that, from the standpoint of reason, life
is an absurdity, an endless struggle, an unnecessary
suffering, ruled by the iron hand of Fate. We are
unable to agree with M. Emile Faguet who, in other
respects, has written so admirable and sympathetic
a work on Nietzsche,^ that the latter suffered, in the
early part of his career, from a " romantic diathesis,''
and that his later career was in some respects a con-
tradiction of his earlier one. Rather are we inclined
to the view, based on the account of the evolution of
Nietzsche's thought given by his sister,^ and on a study
of his own writings, that his position with regard to
the fundamental questions of philosophy, in a word
his *' Weltanschauung," did not vary from the time
of the publication of " Die Geburt der Tragodie "
until his illness in 1889. With regard to his change of
front concerning Schopenhauer, we believe that when
Nietzsche wrote '' Schopenhauer als Erzieher " in the
'* Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen, " in 1874, he did not
realise the meaning of the conclusions drawn by
Schopenhauer from premises which both held in
common. As regards the breach with Richard
Wagner, we are inclined to think Nietzsche very
mistaken in the view taken by him of the tendencies

^ E. Faguet : " En lisant Nietzsche " (Paris, 1904).
^ Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche : " Das Leben Friedrich Nietz-
sches," 2 Bande, iv. Teile (Naumann, Leipzig).

24 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

of the Wagnerian drama, but although he changed his
conception of Wagner, he did not change his concep-
tion of hfe. The conception of Hfe entertained by the
author of '' Richard Wagner in Bayreuth " is the
same as that of the author of '' Der Fall Wagner/'
It was the view which he took of the position occupied
by Wagner's art with regard to that conception which
changed.

This digression as to the conception formed by
Nietzsche of life, and of Greek thought and Greek
culture, was necessary in order to have some compre-
hension of the reasons which led to his memorable
breach with Wagner in 1876, and to his renunciation
of his master, Schopenhauer. During the years of his
professorate at Bale, from 1869 to 1876, Nietzsche was
on terms of the closest intimacy with Wagner and his
wife. Very frequent were the visits which he paid
them in their retreat at Tribschen, and these visits
ever remained the sweetest and most beautiful
reminiscence of Nietzsche's, and indeed of Wagner's,
career. As we have said, Nietzsche was full of
enthusiasm for Wagner's work, which he heralded
as the revival, in modern form, of the Greek tragedy.
He interested himself especially in the scheme pro-
pounded by Wagner for founding a German national
theatre at Bayreuth, and his essay on '' Richard
Wagner at Bayreuth," published in 1876 as the
fifth of the *' Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen," was
destined to assist the propaganda in aid of this scheme.
Wagner, on the other hand, found in Nietzsche a
friend of the highest and most powerful intellect,
of quite extraordinary qualities, and of a character,
as M. Henri Lichtenberger expresses it, '' d'une
trempe pen commune." Probably, in Wagner's
eyes, here was the ideal disciple, such as every great

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 25

master fondly hopes to find, the continuator of the
great work commenced, and which neither Richard
Wagner nor Friedrich Nietzsche was destined to
find.

As a matter of fact, Neitzsche's enthusiasm for
Wagner, both before and during the period of the
Tribschen intimacy, was never of a bhnd or uncritical
description. The two dramas of the master which
he really admired were the Meistersinger and Tris-
tan and Isolde. It seems evident, from certain re-
marks made by him in his notebook during the years
1870-1872 — that is to say, during those two years in
which he was no less than twenty-three times Wagner's
guest at Tribschen — that Nietzsche was conscious of
certain important differences, both in the domain
of philosophy and in that of art, between himself and
Wagner.^ During his frequent visits to Tribschen, he
was under the influence of the powerful personality of
Wagner, who captivated him, chained him, seduced
him. On the other hand, Nietzsche was Wagner's
most valued friend. '* First comes Cosima," used
Wagner to say, '' and then you. And then a long
distance separates all the others." It must be
remembered, too, that the publication of Nietzsche's
essay on " Richard Wagner in Bayreuth," in 1876,
was of great value to Wagner. This essay is recog-
nised by the most orthodox Wagnerian circles as
being one of the best studies of the master ever
published.

The question is : Did Nietzsche change, or did
Wagner change, or did only Nietzsche's conception
of Wagner change ? We have already expressed the
opinion that Nietzsche's convictions underwent no

^ E. Forster-Nietzsche : " Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches,"
ii. 853.

26 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

change in themselves. As to Wagner, we are indined
to think that the author of Parsifal had certainly
modified some of the ideas which inspired him in
writing Tristan and Isolde and Siegfried. The
atheist Wagner had become, if not an orthodox
Christian, certainly a mystic. But Parsifal had
not yet appeared at the time of the rupture with
Nietzsche in 1876. Therefore we can see no other
reason for Nietzsche's action than a change of position
in regard to the Wagnerian ideal, as considered in the
light of his own ideal. But the rupture was not so
sudden as certain think. It was not the affair of a
moment, a coup-de-thedtre so to speak. We have
said that even during the period of the Tribschen
intimacy, Nietzsche's position with regard to certain
of Wagner's works, notably Tannhauser, was one
of more or less mild hostility. But, if Nietzsche
cherished any hopes, during the period of theTribschen
intimacy, of converting Wagner to his own views,
those hopes were speedily dispelled when Wagner
emigrated from Tribschen to Bayreuth. From this
moment on, the seduction exercised by Wagner's
commanding and captivating personality disappeared.
Nietzsche became increasingly conscious of the fact
that Wagner was changing, or, at any rate, that his
conception of Wagner was changing. Far from being
the reviver of Greek ideals which he had dreamed,
Wagner seemed to him to have been '' captured by
the Germans," as he puts it, to be ministering to the
popular vainglory following on the triumphs of 1870,
to be pandering to German chauvinism and German
mysticism, to be seeking for success at the expense
of his own convictions. In 1876, before going to
Bayreuth to assist at the solemn celebrations of the
Niebelungenring, Nietzsche determined to gather

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 2T

together all the tender memories, all the cherished
souvenirs, of that friendship consecrated at Tribschen,
to write, as it were, a sort of memorial tribute, not
to the real Wagner, but to the idealised Wagner, to
the Wagner of his dreams, of his hopes, to the Wagner
who had disappeared. The last of the '' Unzeit-
gemasse Betrachtungen '' is consecrated to " Richard
Wagner in Bayreuth/' But this appreciation, this
glorification of the master, must be understood as a
tribute to the Wagner of the past, to the Wagner
whom Nietzsche had imagined, who had, perhaps,
never existed but in the hopes and dreams of Nietzsche.
It was the last tribute paid at the parting of the ways.

Nietzsche was bitterly disappointed by the repre-
sentation of the '' Ring " in 1876. Wagner, like every
Over-Man, like every overwhelming genius, was
accustomed only to rigid obedience and respect from
those who surrounded him. He was much angered
by Nietzsche's conduct on this occasion. The breach
was completed two years later by the publication
of Nietzsche's book : " Menschliches, Allzumensch-
liches." Wagner regarded Nietzsche's conduct as the
basest of desertions ; he came to look upon his former
bosom friend as an unscrupulous intellectual adven-
venturer, who had not hesitated to make use of his
name and reputation and friendship in order to attain
for himself a certain degree of fame. The flame was
fanned further by attacks on Nietzsche of particular
violence which appeared in the Bayreuther Blatter,

The year 1876 marked the turning point in the
intellectual career of Nietzsche. He had been the
fervent worshipper of Schopenhauer, the beloved
friend of Wagner. Schopenhauer was dead, and the
parting was thus less bitter than the separation from
Wagner. Nietzsche had come to the critical moment

28 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

of his life as thinker and philosopher. Hitherto he
had been searching for himself, searching for an ideal
which might satisfy his conception of life. He had
thought to find that ideal in Schopenhauer and
Wagner ; and he found out that the idols he had been
worshipping were false gods, that they represented,
not the ideal of beauty, and of strength, and of power,
and of ApoUinian and Dionysian wisdom, which he
had discovered among the Greeks, but the very oppo-
site. He saw them now in a quite different light : he
saw them as representing modern civilisation in all its
weariness, in all its disgust of life, in its exhaustion, in
its degeneracy. The bitter pessimism of Schopenhauer
appeared to him the logical outcome of that nihilism
which seems to mark the decay of European culture
to-day. The art of Wagner seemed to him to repre-
sent life under its most nervous and tired aspect ;
he saw in that art a skilful means of administering
a narcotic to overwrought minds, of calming and
drugging them with all the resources of a magician.
And from this moment the contrast, the violent,
poignant contrast, between his ideal of life, the ideal of
Olympian beauty and power, and the ideal of modern
civilisation, with its pessimisms, its disgust of life,
its longing for the nirvana, was to haunt Nietzsche
night and day, giving him a sense of isolation in a
world so totally different in its aspirations.

But not for a moment did Nietzsche hesitate. The
ideals of to-day and yesterday and of the last nineteen
centuries were not his ideals. In the categorical
imperative, in the Sermon on the Mount, in the
democratic movement of to-day, he saw the signs of
decadency. His ideal was an ideal in which none of
those conceptions which the world to-day regards as
beyond controversy could find a place. Very well ;

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 29

he would declare war on modern civilisation in all its
forms. In an age of democracy, of sentimentalism,
of mysticism, he would preach the gospel of ultra-
aristocratism, of hatred instead of love, of immoralism
instead of morality, of egoism instead of altruism, of
hardness of heart instead of sympathy, of art as the
justification of life instead of the moral law. He
recognised now that he had been living in slippery
places, that he had been in real danger of succumbing
to the universal degeneracy which he would hence-
forth combat without mercy, that he had been seduced
by false charmers, that he had attributed to Schopen-
hauer ctnd Wagner ideas which they never entertained.
His sincerity, and the loyalty and sublime disinterest-
edness of his character, had led him, and it always led
him, to idealise his friends, to see in them something
which they were not, something more than they
possessed. It was thus that he had idealised Schopen-
hauer and Wagner. It was thus that he was destined
subsequently to see in Frau Andreas Lou-Salome
qualities which she never possessed. It was thus that
he was led to estimate friends like Herr Rohde and
Dr Ree at far above their real value. This faculty of
idealising his friends was destined often to lead him
into very painful positions.

Thus we find Nietzsche having completed the
search for himself. We find him at war with all the
ideals of modern civilisation. It is not the ideal
which he has set forth in '' Die Geburt der Tragodie "
which has been modified. But he has realised that
that ideal is the diametrical opposite of the ideal of
to-day ; that his ideal is an ideal of exuberant life,
and of beauty, and of power, and of strength ; whereas
the ideal of to-day is an anaemic ideal, the fruit of
degeneracy, of nihilism, of weariness, of neuropathy.

30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

In all modern institutions, in all that constitutes the
pride of our modernity, in the State, in the different
religions, in the moral law, in modern science, Nietzsche
sees the obstacle of the establishment of his ideal.
In temperament and constitution a contemporary of
iEschylus or Pericles, he finds himself transplanted
into a hostile atmosphere saturated with Christianity,
with moralism and Hegelianism and romanticism.

In 1878 Nietzsche published '' MenschUches,
Allzumenschliches." But already, before this publi-
cation, his health had become seriously undermined.
In 1869 he had had a bad fall from a horse, which had
laid him up for a considerable time. In 1870 he
served in the Franco-German War, in the Ambulance
Department ; and his health had again broken down
under the strain. The stress of his university work
in the intervening years, the emotion caused by his
rupture with Wagner, and by his breach with all ideas
hitherto held sacred as being steps towards the
attainment of the ultimate great Ideal, and which he
was now obliged to recognise as being diametrically
opposed to the realisation of that ultimate ideal, again
brought on a complete breakdown in 1876, a break-
down in which the serious illness of 1870 also had its
share. Nietzsche had been insufficiently treated in
1870 ; he had recommenced work too soon ; and he
had overworked. He had to pay a heavy debt now.
In 1876 he was compelled to take a year's leave, most
of which he passed at Sorrento. In 1877 he recom-
menced his professional duties at Bale, and in 1878 he
published " Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.'' But
his university work was too heavy for him, his health
became rapidly worse, and in 1879 he was forced, to
his deep regret, to resign his professorship.

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 31

The severance of his connection with the Univer-
sity of Bale, where he had been active during ten
years, was the outward and visible sign of that more
profound separation which Nietzsche now effected
between himself and all modern culture. His health
was very seriously undermined. He was the victim of
violent and frequent headaches, which left him nearly
paralysed with pain. Between January 1880 and
January 1881 he counted no fewer than one hundred
and eighteen such attacks. He passed the winters in
the south, the summers generally in the mountain air
of Switzerland. During three years, from 1879 to 1882,
he lay, as it were, between life and death, in per-
petual physical pain, but never losing courage for
an instant, disputing every inch of ground with his
malady heroically, battling resolutely for health.
These years of physical suffering and illness were also
the years of his most profound intellectual discourage-
ment, the years of the most complete negation.
Nietzsche himself was fully aware of the gravity of the
physical and moral crisis which he was going through.
According to him, there was an intimate connection
between the two. He had been afflicted, during the
years 1869-1876, with the Wagnerian diathesis, so to
speak. He had been nearly conquered by ideals
which were the contrary, in reality, of his ideal, and
which he had represented as being identical. He had
been the victim of illusions, due to the excessive
confidence and exaggerated faculty of idealisation
which he possessed. But this worship of Wagner
and Schopenhauer was not natural to him. It was
a worship given under a misapprehension as to the
tendencies of these two masters. And now was the
period of intellectual emancipation. His physical
suffering stood in co-relation to his moral suffering ; or

32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

his moral suffering stood in co-relation to his physical
suffering. Certain it is that the years of severe illness,
from 1876-1882, which were destined to end in fairly
complete recovery, were also the years of moral
suffering, destined to end in his entire emancipation
from Schopenhauer and Wagner and the whole of
modern civilisation and all the aspirations which he
had cherished up to the present, and which were
so many obstacles to the attainment of life in all its
power and plenitude and beauty, which was always
the ideal of Nietzsche.

We can trace the crisis through which Nietzsche
was passing, in his works ; and we see the effect
of the physical malady on his intellectual evolution.
In 1878 he published '' Menschliches, Allzumensch-
liches.'' In no book has he been so coldly, so entirely
negative as in this one. Every ideal which humanity
has been accustomed to look upon with reverence
and respect, as something beyond controversy, as
something higher and more durable than itself, is
coldly and calmly — or violently — flung aside. " Der
Wandrer und sein Schatten '' followed in 1879, as
the completion of the first work — a book which is full
of sadness, with its depicting of the '' Wanderer '' who
searches among the labyrinth of the forest to find his
way, accompanied always by his shadow, which haunts
him. But already in *' Morgenrothe " (1881) we see
the signs of improvement in health. The ferocious
negation of the *' Human, all too Human '' is gradually
giving way to a more positive ideal. '' Die frohliche
Wissenschaft '' (1882) is the herald of recovery,
written in a strain of gaiety and optimism, in the
" most beautiful of all Januaries,'' which Nietzsche
passed at Genoa. Nietzsche himself writes in the
preface : *' Thankfulness flows from it as a stream.

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 33

thankfulness for that which was the least expected,
the thankfulness of a man who has recovered — for this
recovery was what was least expected. ' The gay
science ' : this title means the saturnalia of a mind
which has long been oppressed by an overwhelming
weight, which has remained patient, strong, self-
possessed, never yielding, but without any hope ; and
now it finds itself all of a sudden face to face with
hope, with the hope of recovery, it is intoxicated by
the hope of recovery." ^

Released from the duties attached to his professor-
ship at Bale, Nietzsche's life was henceforth to be that
of a wanderer. Even as in his intellectual evolution
he was for ever peregrinating along the road of know-
ledge, ever seeking to quench his thirst for knowledge,
ever curious of things new, so in his manner of living
he was henceforth to be permanently on the move,
a wanderer without a house, spending his summers
mostly in the Engadine, in the village of Sils-Maria,
and his winters on the shores of the Mediterranean.
He had an intense love for the south, with its sunshine
and warmth and the balmy breezes from the sea.
Venice, where his friend and faithful disciple, Herr
Peter Gast, lived for some time, Rapallo, Nice, were his
favourite resorts. In 1883 he visited Rome with his
sister, and stayed in a house on the Piazza Barberini.
*' On a loggia, high above the Piazza, from which a

* " Die Dankbarkeit stromt fortwahrend aus, als ob eben das
Unerwartetste geschehen sei, die Dankbarkeit eines Genesenden —
denn die Genesung war dieses Unerwartetste. ' Frohliche Wissen-
schaft ' : das bedeutet die Saturnalien eines Geistes, der einem
furchtbaren langen Drucke geduldig widerstanden hat — geduldig,
streng, kalt, ohne sich zu unterwerfen, aber ohne Hoffnung —
und der jetzt mit Einem Male von der Hoffnung angef alien wird,
von der Hoffnung auf Gesundheit, von der Trunkenheit der
Genesung " (" Werke," v. 3).
c

34 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

view of Rome is obtained, and where one hears the
gentle murmur of the fountain beneath, was composed
that most soUtary of all songs that have ever been
sung, the Song of the Night/' This refers to that
exquisite " Nachtlied '' of Zarathustra :

** Nacht ist es : nun reden alle springenden Brunnen. Und auch

meine Seele ist ein springender Brunnen.
Nacht ist es : nun erst erwachen alle Lieder der Liebenden.

Und auch meine Seele ist das Lied eines Liebenden." ^

The visit to Rome, to the eternal, unique, incom-
parable city, inspired several passages of Nietzsche's
master-work. The sight of the ruins of the majestic
Basilica of Constantine, the passing of a procession
of white-robed priests on the Monte Aventino, the
gigantic dimensions of St Peter's, the cloisters of
San Giovanni Laterano, all impressed him, as they
impress everyone, and impressed him the more because
his was an essentially impressive nature. Another
city which delighted him was Genoa. It was in
Genoa that '' Die frohliche Wissenschaft " was com-
posed. Its palaces, its history, its situation, its
climate, even his hosts, charmed him. He writes :
*' I see here the faces of generations which are past and
gone ; the whole district is full of the portraits of
brave, bold and proud men. These lived and desired
not only to live, but to live on, always ; I see this
wish expressed in the construction of their houses,
built and decorated not merely for the passing hour,
but for centuries." ^ Venice charmed him perhaps

1 ((

It is night : now begin the bubbling wells to speak. And my

soul, too, is as a bubbling well.
It is night : now begin all the songs of the lovers. And my soul,

too, is as the song of a lover."

^ E. Forster-Nietzsche : " Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches,"
ii. 363-

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 35

more than anything. The palaces, the silence, the
Piazza San Marco with the Campanile and the Palace
of the Doges, and the doves, the poetical atmosphere of
the whole town, which seemed to transplant him into
another age, all filled his artistic soul with joy. He
had the further pleasure of having his devoted friend,
Herr Peter Cast, there — Gast, whose music conquered
him, and who was ever ready to do some service for
the venerated master. Rapallo, on the Italian
Riviera, was the scene of the composition of the first
part of '* Also sprach Zarathustra," and as such it
occupies an important place in Nietzsche's life. He
describes the origin of the idea of Zarathustra in his
brain : ''In the morning (February 1883) I began the
ascent in a southerly direction of the lovely road
towards Zoagli, which led me past Pini and brought
me to a point commanding a grand view of the sea ;
in the afternoon I made the tour of the whole Bay of
Santa Margherita as far as Portofino. During these
two walks, the whole conception of Zarathustra
presented itself to me, especially the type of Zara-
thustra himself.'' ^ Later on he frequented Nice,
which always charmed him. It was in Nice that the
third part of '' Also sprach Zarathustra " was com-
posed (1883-1884). '' Under the halcyon sky of Nice,
which shone for the first time on my life, I found the
third Zarathustra. That decisive part which bears
the title : ' Concerning the old and the new tables,'
was composed during a most difficult climb from the
station to the wonderful Moorish cliff Eza." For
Nietzsche, life and beauty were synonymous with
southern climates and the southern sun. Italy was

1 <*

Auf diesen beiden Wegen fiel mir der ganze erste Zarathustra
ein, vor allem Zarathustra selber, als Typus : rich tiger, er iiberfiel
mich."

36 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

for him the unique country, where alone Hfe was

rendered sweet, whose music was charming, where

alone art was understood and cherished.

" Morgenrothe '' had already breathed a new spirit.

Its title was suggestive, as being the dawn of a new

era:

" Es giebt so viele Morgenrothe
Die noch nicht geleuchtet haben.*'

But a new morning sky was heralded in this work,
where the first streaks of the coming day are perceived.
Then follows *' Die frohliche Wissenschaft," breathing
the spirit of gratitude and of hope and of renewed
confidence in life. And then followed that marvel-
lous burst of lyrical enthusiasm, '' Also sprach
Zarathustra.*' It is a song of triumph, the song of the
wanderer who has returned home at last, who was
lost and is found, who has fought the fight and is
victorious. It is a song of victory and of faith, of
hope and afiirmation, and of life and love.

The poem of Zarathustra contains four published
parts, written between January 1883 and January
1885 ; a fifth part was projected by Nietzsche, and
destined to end with the death of Zarathustra.
Nietzsche has left five plans of this fifth part, none
of which he ever put into execution.

As we have said, since the resignation of his chair
at the University of Bale left him free, Nietzsche led
a wandering and roaming life, wanderings which were
mainly determined by the necessities of his health.
It is astonishing to contemplate the philosophical and
literary activity of Nietzsche during this period of
restlessness, in spite of all obstacles. The publication
of '' Zarathustra " was followed by that of '' Jenseits
von Gut und Bose,'' in August 1886. The work
*' Zur Genealogie der Moral '' was written and pub-

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 37

lished in 1887. The year 1888, the last year of
his intellectual career, witnessed the production of
*' Der Fall Wagner/' of '' Gotzendammerung/' of
*'Der Antichrist," and of " Der Wille zur Macht."
" Derniere moisson, moisson feconde/'

But during all these years which followed the physi-
cal and moral crisis of 1876-1881, the position of Nietz-
sche in the world was one of growing isolation. The
ever-increasing separation, the ever-widening breach
between him and his times, the divergences of their
respective aspirations, the growing hardiness and
temerity of his views, all led, bit by bit, to an estrange-
ment between him and the world. The quarrel with
Wagner, with the best-beloved friend, in whom all
his fondest hopes were placed, left,' a gap in his life
which never could be filled. His wandering life, his
inability, through reasons of health, to settle down in
a house of his own, prevented him from taking root
anywhere. His tendency to idealise all those with
whom he came into closer contact, to see in his friends
not so much what they really were as what he wished
and believed them to be, led him into some bitter
disappointments, the bitterness of which was aug-
mented by the extreme sensitiveness and delicacy of
his nature. And yet how he longed for a friend, for
a real, true friend and confidant, for a disciple in
whom he could place implicit trust, whom he could
rely on to continue the work so bravely commenced
by him ! There is a passage in his private diary which
expresses this secret yearning of all his later life :

'' Wer die grossten Geschenke zu vergeben hat, sucht
nach Solchen, welche sie zu nehmen verstehen — er
sucht vielleicht umsonst. Er wirft endlich sein
Geschenk weg. Dergleichen gehort zur geheimen
Geschichte und Verzweiflung der reichsten Seelen : es

38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

ist vielleicht der unverstandlichste und schwermii-
tigste aller Ungliicksfalle auf Erden/' ^

The constant concentration of his mind on the most
exalted and most intricate problems which confront
humanity, added to the growing isolation which he
himself felt more than anyone. Not with impunity
can one be for ever absorbed in the lofty question of
the origin and validity of all the tables of values — of
metaphysical and moral and scientific values — which
humanity possesses or has possessed. Nietzsche
himself writes of the conception of the Everlasting
Return of all things, which dawned on him one superb
summer morning in the forest of Silvaplana in the
Engadine, that it originated '' at 6000 feet above
the sea, and far higher above all human things."
This accurately represents the state of Nietzsche's
mind. He lived in an atmosphere which was all his
own. He concentrated that powerful brain of his on the
highest and deepest problems, which he perpetually
meditated. He had thrown overboard all the values
which humanity has revered up till to-day. He lived,
as he himself expresses it, '' jenseits von Gut und
Bose," beyond and above things good and bad, beyond
and above all things human. He had ever before his
mind's eye the glowing vision of the future, of a new
world, of a new humanity, regenerated and purified
and beautified, of the Over-Man, incarnation of beauty
and strength and power, of light-heartedness and
insouciance, of life in all its vigour and plenitude.
He had elevated, by a superhuman effort of his

* " He who has the most precious gifts to bestow seeks those who
are worthy to receive them — and seeks perhaps in vain. At last
he throws those gifts aside. This tragedy appertains to the secret
history and despair of the greatest minds ; it is perhaps the most
incomprehensible and melancholy of all tragedies on earth."

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 39

indomitable will, his mind far, far above all those
things which interested his contemporaries ; he had
attained those regions of lofty serenity and great
silence which are also the regions of eternal snow, and
alone, in that great silence under the stars, he stood
contemplating the accumulation of ruins, of tears and
sufferings, of joy and hope, of victories and defeats,
which, far beneath him in the valleys, constitute the
history of the world and of humanity.

But it must not be concluded that Nietzsche was
of a cold and haughty disposition. Few men have
possessed, according to the accounts of all who were
privileged to know him, a more charming and lovable
character. Nothing was further from him than
vanity or arrogance, and, if he instinctively repulsed
those whose manner was displeasing to his excessively
refined taste, he was, towards his friends, full of
kindness and charm and thoughtfulness. If his
intellectual isolation was irksome to him, if he was
a man who yearned for friends and yet found none
worthy of him, if he was, of course, aware of his
immeasurable superiority to all those who surrounded
him, yet he never was anything but cheerful, a charm-
ing companion, and filled with sympathy for all men
and things. All those who met him at Sils-Maria, or
on the Riviera, liked him and respected him. He was
an altogether striking personality, in the presence of
whom the trivialities and conventional banalities of
daily conversation seemed out of place ; and in whose
presence all boasting, all pretentiousness, all unreality
were equally out of place. Nietzsche himself has
maintained that he could at once detect, thanks to his
extraordinary scent, any " physiological abnormality.'*
Certain it is that those who, being physiologically
or psychologically inferior, were admitted to his

40 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

presence, at once felt themselves probed to the
bottom by the brilliant, piercing blue eyes of their
interlocutor. Triviality and uncleanliness, whether
bodily or mental, were two things which could never
stand in the presence of so delicate, cultured and
aristocratic a soul as that of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche was the greatest of idealists ; and his
passionate idealism led him into grievous mistakes and
blinded him as to the real merits and defects of his
friends. He speaks of Herr Peter Gast, the faithful
friend and disciple, as if Gast were a great musician,
and he estimated him far higher than Wagner. He
saw in Dr Ree, in Professor Erwin Rohde, in Frau
Lou-Salome, personages of a distinction which they
were far from possessing. Nietzsche's generous nature
was the opposite of those who are always ready to
detract, to find out some little defect on which they
may insist. Nietzsche saw in his friends nothing but
perfection ; but bitter was the disappointment when
at last the truth could no longer be concealed, and
the veil fell from his eyes.

Nietzsche's was one of those natures which give them-
selves freely, lovingly, confidingly, disinterestedly ;
and, like all such natures, he yearned for human
sympathy and human love, for that same sympathy
and love which he was ready and longing to give. This
statement will surprise those who only know Nietzsche
from some famous, oft-repeated aphorisms, such as his
advice to *' become hard,'' and his doctrine that the
greatness of a man is to be measured by his capacity
to inflict suffering. But in his private life Nietzsche
appears as one of those ideal natures to whom might
be applied the description by a French poet of Victor
Hugo : '' Dieu mit d'abord dans son coeur la grande
bonte." We find him writing to a friend in need.

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 41

begging him to accept a small loan ; and when this
is declined he writes sorrowfully to his sister : " It
would have made me richer had he only accepted it/'
He writes of himself, and his testimony is abundantly
confirmed : ** My experiences, even with those who
have afforded bad experiences to everyone else, speak
without exception in my favour ; I tame every bear,
I make the most ill-tempered amiable. During seven
years that I was at the Bale Pedagogium teaching
Greek, I never had cause to inflict a single penalty ;
the laziest worked willingly with me/' ^ He quarrelled
violently with Wagner. He wrote against Wagner the
bitterest of pamphlets. And yet he loved Wagner
always : '' Den habe ich sehr geliebt,'' he used to say,
almost with tears. And when Wagner died at Venice,
in 1883, he wrote to Frau Cosima Wagner the most
beautiful and tender of letters.

" In former days,'' he wrote, '* you did not disdain
to take my advice in a critical situation ; and now,
when the news has just reached me that the bitterest
has overtaken you, I know not how to give expres-
sion to my feelings, except by pouring them out
entirely to you and only to you.

*' Not what you have lost, but what you now possess,
is my dominant thought ; and there can be but few
persons who can say with such depth of feeling :
' Even as it was my whole duty, all that I did for the
sake of this beloved one, and nothing more — ^so is it
also my whole reward.'

'' You have lived for one ideal, and sacrificed every-
thing to that ideal ; and over and above your love
for him who is no more, you understood and grasped
the highest, that which all his love and all his hopes

^ E. Forster-Nietzsche : " Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches,"
ii. 820.

42 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

embraced. You served that, you belong to that, as
also does your name, for eternity — that which is
immortal, which dies not with the body, although it
is born with it.

" Few have such aspirations ; and — of these few —
who can realise them as you can ?

'' Thus it is that my thoughts go out to you to-day,
and thus have I always thought of you, if from a far
distance, of you who are the woman whom my heart
most greatly reveres." ^

His love for all that is artistic, all that is beautiful,
his passion for music — *' I know no difference between
music and tears,'' he writes ', '' 1 know that happiness
which cannot think of the south without a slight
shudder of timidity " — are these the signs of a brutal
and violent nature ? There are a thousand passages
from his works which reveal the tenderness of every
fibre of his nature. Could anyone but a delicate and
sentimental nature have written, as he wrote, of
Venice ? —

*^ An der Briicke stand
Jiingst ich in brauner Nacht.
Femher kam Gesang :
Goldener Tropfen quoU's
liber die zitternde Flache wag.
Gondeln, Lichter, Musik —

Trunken schwamm's in die Dammerung hinaus. . . .
Meine Seele, ein Saitenspiel,
Sang sich, unsichtbar beriihrt,
Heimlich ein Gondellied dazu,
Zitternd vor bunter Seeligkeit.
— Horte Jemand ihr zu ? . . ."

Alas ! no one remained to listen to this song of
a great soul. Solitude, certainly, Nietzsche loved.
'' Oh Einsamkeit ! Du meine Heimat Einsamkeit ! "

^ E. Forster-Nietzsche : " Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches,"ii. 863.

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 43

he wrote. But he felt also the want of a friend in
whom he could confide, who could understand him
and, what was for him more important, his ideal.
" How many years have elapsed,'' he writes to his
sister, '' since I last heard a word that really appealed
to me, that went to my heart.'' '' My dear old
friend," he writes again, already in 1884, to one of
the comrades of his youth, '' when I read your last
letter it seemed to me as if you shook my hand with
a melancholy look, as if you would say : ' How is it
possible that we have to-day so few things in common,
that we live as if in different worlds ! And yet, long
ago ! ' Thus, dear friend, goes it with all those who are
dear to me : all seems finished and past. One sees
each other still, one talks in order to break the silence,
one writes letters in order to break the silence. But
I know the voice of truth, and I hear it saying :
' Friend Nietzsche, you are alone.' " In 1887 he
writes to his sister : " O heaven, how lonely I am
to-day ! . . . I have no one with whom I can laugh,
no one with whom I can take even a cup of tea, no one
to comfort me ! " His friend, Baron Heinrich von
Stein, died early, and his loss was very keenly felt by
Nietzsche. With Professor Rohde he had quarrelled,
his friend Baron von Gersdorff was seldom with him,
and his sister, the friend and confidante of a lifetime,
had gone out to Paraguay with her husband, Herr
Bernhard Forster. Few perhaps can understand what
it must have cost the author of " Zarathustra "
to have perpetually to frequent the society of the
amiable nonentities, English, French or German, who
filled the hotels and boarding-houses of the Engadine
and the Riviera. And yet he was always cheerful,
always full of that charming courtesy which was
peculiar to him, always ready with a kind word or

44 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

with the offer of a service, always popular. The
people he thus met never understood who or what
he was. *' He was a most delightful companion, very
intelligent, but nothing of a great mind,'' was the
opinion expressed by one person. Nietzsche accepted
this misunderstanding cheerfully. '' It is my mask,"
he used to say laughingly with regard to his modesty
of demeanour. He knew that it was not such people
who would be called upon to judge him. '' The day
after to-morrow first belongs to me,'' he wrote ; and
he knew that his work was for those for whom it was
destined — for the chosen few, and for them only.

The whole work of Nietzsche is that of an artist.
As his sister truly says, sunshine and blue sky were
necessaries of life to him. The beauties of nature,
the beauties of art and of music, who appreciated
them, loved them, wished for them, more deeply than
Nietzsche ? The poem of Zarathustra was composed
partly at Rapallo, in view of the lovely bay of Santa
Margherita, partly in the Eternal City, with its
memories and treasures, partly in Nice, '' under that
halcyon sky," and with the blue expanse of water
beneath. The idea of the Everlasting Return occurred
to him in the midst of a forest, among the grandeurs
of the High Engadine, at a height of 6000 feet. The
" Gaya Scienza " is all saturated with the atmosphere
of the '* most beautiful of all Januaries," passed under
the Italian sky at Genoa. Nietzsche loved the sun-
shine and the stars, and the moonlight on the lagoons
of Venice, and the soft caressing music of the south
which brings with it a gentle breeze of Mediterranean
air.

As we have said, the year 1888 was the busiest,
as it was the last, of Nietzsche's career as thinker.
He wrote '' Der Fall Wagner," the '' Gotzendam-

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 45

merung/' '' Der Antichrist/' and the fragments of
" Der Wille zur Macht/' which have been pubhshed.
With regard to the latter work, which contains the
entire philosophy of Nietzsche in a nutshell, it cannot
be too deeply deplored that the breakdown of the
author's health prevented its completion. Its con-
tents are, indeed, already contained in the poem of
Zarathustra. But Nietzsche was the first to under-
stand the difficulties which would arise concerning the
interpretation of the latter work. Already in 1883,
when '' Zarathustra " was finished, Nietzsche seems
to have planned the writing of a new volume which
should contain the exposition, in prose and in a more
methodical style, of the ideas expressed in lyrical
language by Zarathustra. In 1886 he wrote out a
plan for this new work, to be composed in four books.
But in 1887 he revised this plan, and finally deter-
mined the composition of this new work as follows : —

Der Wille zur Macht : Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte

i. Der europaische Nihilismus.
ii. Kritik der hochsten Werte.
iii. Prinzip einer neuen Wertsetzung.
iv. Zucht und Ziichtung.

This plan was carried out, and the work was
published posthumously by the Nietzsche- Archiv
at Weimar.^ The plan, however, formed but part of
a much larger scheme for exposing his philosophy
in all its details, which Nietzsche was unfortunately
unable to complete.

^ The following is the translation of the title : —

The Will of Power : the Transvaluation of all Values
i. The European Nihilism.
ii. Critique of the Highest Values,
iii. Principles of a new Evaluation,
iv. Rearing and Selection.

46 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

The year 1888 was one of extraordinary cerebral
activity. It also happened that the summer, which
Nietzsche spent as usual at Sils-Maria, was one
in which exceptionally bad weather prevailed.
Nietzsche's health, always far from robust, was
unfavourably influenced by these climatic con-
ditions. Although, since his comparative recovery
in 1882, he had had no return of the violent attacks
of pain to which he was formerly a martyr, he had
been obliged to take constant precautions in view
of his health, which remained in a weak condition.
Unfortunately he had no one to look after him and
to care for him. The solitude in which he was
plunged, and the constant concentration of his mind,
and the vertiginous heights to which his thoughts
perpetually soared, all combined to make him neglect
a hygienic regime indispensable to him, to fatigue
his already somewhat overwrought nervous system,
to keep him in a state of unceasing cerebral tension.
Everything seemed to combine against him, in this
his final year of activity. First, came a renewed
and very bitter attack from the Bayreuth ring, who
had never forgiven, and never could forgive, '' Der
Fall Wagner.'' This attack, ungenerous itself, was
made increasingly bitter by the fact that it was
published in a musical review whose administrator
was Herr E. Fritsch, of Leipzig, Nietzsche's own
publisher. He had an increasing sense of loneliness,
of isolation. Especially did the absurd silence of the
entire German world of thought with regard to his
labours fill him with anger and sorrow. He com-
plains to his sister of this '' feeling of utter loneliness,
this want of sympathy, this general ingratitude
towards me. . . . Why is there no sign of approval,
no understanding me, no cordial appreciation ? "

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 47

Nietzsche sought refuge from his woes, the neglect
of his compatriots, the want of friendship and
understanding, in renewed work. And he worked
hard, and he forced his brain to concentrate itself
for a violent effort, as if he had conscience of the fact
that it was to be a last effort ; and increasing
nervosity and insomnia ensued as a natural result.
The sleeping draughts of chloral, to which he had
long accustomed himself, became ever larger and
ever larger, as his cerebral tension increased, and
the insomnia became more difficult to cope with. In
the course of his wanderings, Nietzsche had made the
acquaintance of a Dutch gentleman from Java, who
recommended him, as sleeping-draught and general
remedy for hypertension of the nervous system, a
drug which he had himself discovered in the East.
Nietzsche, foolishly enough, determined to try this
drug, a concoction which medical science had never
analysed. And the effects were good, so good that
Nietzsche slept long under them and awoke with an
ever-increasingly confused brain. This was the state
of the man at the close of 1888. Overworked, racked
with worry, in ill-health, sleeping only by means of
enormous doses of chloral and of this Eastern drug,
with his whole nervous system strained to breaking-
point — it would have required the constant care and
affection of a mother or sister or friend, who could
have comforted him, nursed him, cheered his solitude,
afforded him light and agreeable distractions, to
avoid the coming blow.

Alas ! Nietzsche was alone. After a bad summer
in the Engadine, which increased his bad health
and bad spirits, he arrived at Turin, en route for
the Riviera. At Turin he found the weather most
favourable ; he cheered up under the influence of an

48 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Italian autumn, and we find him writing in a most
cheerful frame of mind to his sister in Paraguay.
He began, not content with producing '' Der Fall
Wagner,'' the '' Gotzendammerung,'' and that most
important work " Der Wille zur Macht,'' one after
another in the same year, to write an intimate diary,
which he entitled " Ecce Homo/' He begins this
diary thus :

'' On this most important of days, when not only
are the grapes brown, but when all is ripe, suddenly
a gleam of sunshine fell on me and lighted up my
whole life : I looked back, I looked up, I never saw
at one and the same time so many good things. Not
for nothing have I just completed my forty-fourth
year — it was well for me to bury it, for what has
lived during that year is saved and is immortal.
The first book of the Transvaluation of all Values,
the Song of Zarathustra, the Twilight of the Idols,^
my essay in ' philosophy by means of the hammer,'
— all are the gifts of this one year, indeed of the last
three months ! How would it be possible for me not
to be thankful for my whole life ? And thus will I
recount the story of my life." '

In this state of hypertension, of over-excitement,
nothing could have been worse than to have caused
Nietzsche irritation. This, however, is precisely
what he encountered. Instead of that loving
sympathy which a home or kind friends could and
should have prepared for him, he found himself
exposed to one attack after the other. His old and
venerated friend, Frau Malwida von Meysenbug,
commenced by attacking him on the subject of

^ " Gotzendammerung."

^ E. Forster-Nietzsche : " Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches,'*
ii. 892.

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 49

" Der Fall Wagner/' Then followed that calumni-
ous attack by an obscure member of the Bayreuth
ring in the Musikalische Wochenblatt, of which
Nietzsche's publisher was the administrator. En-
couraged by this attack on the part of the Bay-
reuth ring, and by the silence with which it was
received — for Nietzsche was unable to reply and no
one came forward in his defence — other enemies, of
the baser sort, came forward, with all sorts of anony-
mous letters, containing statements concerning
Nietzsche's sister in Paraguay and her husband,
Herr Forster. This last method of causing annoy-
ance was also, perhaps, the most effective. The
thought that his sister, the dearest friend and con-
fidante of his whole lifetime, was turning against him,
incited by her husband, was the final drop in the cup
already full to brimming over. In the midst of this
solitude, attacked on all sides, unable to defend
himself, exasperated beyond measure by his foes,
rendered desperate by the thought of his sister's
abandonment, Nietzsche wrote on, wrote on, forc-
ing his tired, weary eyes to work, forcing his tired,
overwrought brain to work, stimulating the one with
powerful spectacles, stimulating the other with
chloral in ever-stronger doses — in order to obtain
that sleep which would not come, and which was
his sole refuge from all his worries and woes. It could
not last. The brain, worked up to an impossible
pitch, suddenly broke down ; and a paralytic stroke
put an end to Nietzsche's career as thinker in the
early days of 1889.

It has become customary — as was to be foreseen —
to talk of Nietzsche as if a trace of insanity were to
be found in all his works, as if the stroke which feU
at Turin in January 1889 were but the culminating

D

50 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

point of a morbid state dating back some fifteen
years, and which, according to this theory, was
inherited by Nietzsche. In view of the attempt
which has been made to discredit Nietzsche's work
on the ground that it is the work of an insane person,
and in view of the not unnatural success which has
attended this attempt, especially, or exclusively,
among the uninitiated — we say, not unnatural, for it
is an easy and convenient way of refuting views which
may be only with difficulty refuted by more serious
arguments — we think it well to give a brief sketch
of Nietzsche's history from the medical point of
view.

Nietzsche belonged to a family in which exceptional
longevity was the rule. Most of the brothers and
sisters of his father, as also his grandfather, survived
the age of seventy, and some of them attained eighty
or even ninety years. The same rule of longevity
prevailed in the family of his mother. On the other
hand, not one single case of insanity, or of any mental
aberration, is reported among any of his immediate
ancestors or relations. Nietzsche's father, it is
true, died at the early age of thirty-six, from softening
of the brain. But this softening of the brain was
caused by a fall down some stairs, which had occurred
eleven months previously ; and, Nietzsche being five
years old when this accident happened, no further
account need be taken of it. During his early life
Nietzsche was gifted with exceptionally good health.
His sister reports that, when, at the university as a
student, he used to return in his riding-suit from a
cross-country gallop, everyone admired the splendid
build of his frame and the physical strength which
it revealed. He never had a serious complaint of
any sort, it seems, before 1869, when a fall from his

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 51

horse laid him up for a considerable time. Then
came 1870 and the Franco-German War, in which
Nietzsche served in the Ambulance Department.
The severe strain of this winter campaign proved
too much for him. He became seriously ill, and,
without being properly cured or sufficiently rested,
he resumed his arduous work as professor at Bale.
From this time onwards came constantly recurring
headaches, of ever-increasing severity, till at last,
as we have seen, he was compelled to abandon his
professorship at Bale. During two years he lay a
martyr to his sufferings, but towards 1881 his health
improved, and from 1881 to the time of his attack
in 1889 he does not seem to have suffered from this
complaint to any great extent. But his health was
visibly undermined. It was only by means of the
strictest hygienic regime, by constant changes of
climate, that life was rendered more or less support-
able. In this fragile state of his health, Nietzsche
required a woman's care and constant affection ;
he required a doctor to supervise him, to prevent
him from overworking himself. But, left to himself,
Nietzsche subjected his brain to a work which,
powerful as that brain was, it was nevertheless
unable to cope with. And we must constantly
bear in mind that Nietzsche was no mere coldly
objective philosopher, but that his philosophy was
inseparable from himself, from his life, that he lived
his ideas in the most literal sense. By nature of
an extremely delicate and sensitive disposition, his
work filled him with an enthusiasm which it is hard
to conceive. His state of mind after the completion
of each part of the poem of Zarathustra was one of
extraordinary excitement. He was himself Zara-
thustra, preaching, in terms of lyrical beauty, a new

52 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

gospel to the world. He saw himself uplifted above
all humanity, soaring in the vast spaces and immense
silence of the region of eternal snow, he saw the
vision of the future before him, the radiant vision
of the Over-Man, far above all things human, far
removed from all that which humanity has venerated
up till now, the creator of the new tables of the law,
of the new values, of him who '' is to mould centuries
according to his image, as if they were wax." In a
state like this, every fibre of a nervous system already
overwrought by long and painful illness was strained.
Insomnia attacked him, and he had recourse to ever-
stronger doses of chloral and of that fatal Eastern
drug given him by the Dutch gentleman from Java ',
at the same time, instead of reposing his nervous
system and giving it time to calm itself, he worked
on and overworked, till at last overwork and drugs
and worries proved too much, and that powerful
brain, which had created Zarathustra, succumbed
to the demands made upon it.

No trace of any morbid influence is to be found in
any of Nietzsche's works, with the exception of the
later part of his intimate diary, " Ecce Homo,"
written at the end of 1888, after the completion of
all his philosophical and literary work. When we
come to these passages of the diary, written in
December 1888, certain traces of a distinctly morbid
character are to be seen. But the contrast is great
between these passages and the rest of Nietzsche's
work, a contrast clearly showing that his productions,
from the " Birth of Greek Tragedy" to "The Will
of Power," are not the fruit of an abnormal state of
mind. At the end of his life of thinker, Nietzsche
seems transplanted into another world. He was
thus transplanted when he wrote " Zarathustra,"

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 53

but in a different fashion, for '' Zarathustra '' is a
coherent, well-ordered work, showing all the signs
of an exceptionally powerful and fertile intellect ;
whereas certain passages in '' Ecce Homo " are
incoherent and absurd. Under this morbid influence
which heralded by some weeks the fatal stroke,
Nietzsche sees himself as a stranger, he contemplates
himself as if from afar. He is the continuator of the
work of Jesus Christ, as he is also the deadliest enemy
of that work, and he is continuing it by annihilating
it and trans valuating it. Across nineteen centuries,
he stretches his hand out to what he believes to be
his predecessor. This idea haunts him continually,
and his last letter to Georg Brandes, written on
4th January 1889, and undoubtedly the product of an
insane mind, is signed by him '' The Crucified One.*'

The paralytic stroke which attacked him in
Turin was a mild one, and confined to cerebral
paralysis. Nietzsche was able to go out and to write.
It was his letters which first gave alarm to his
friends. Professor Overbeck, his former colleague
in Bale, came in haste to Turin, and took Nietzsche
back with him to Bale. After being nursed for a
time at Bale, he was removed to Jena and thence to
Naumburg, where his mother and sister joined him,
the latter returning from Paraguay to nurse the now
helpless brother. Nietzsche was still able to go out,
and he met his sister at the station with a bouquet
of flowers to greet her on her return.

The decline of the creator of " Zarathustra, *' of the
great apostle and lover of life and of beauty, of the
enthusiastic prophet of the Over-Man, symbol of life
and of beauty and of strength, was a decline singu-
larly sublime in its pathos and melancholy. The

54 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

silence which had accompanied Nietzsche during
his active Ufe, a silence broken towards the end by
a few members of the elite of the world of thought
— by Brandes in Denmark, by Taine in France, by
Burckhardt in Switzerland — now suddenly gave way
to a celebrity which resounded throughout Europe,
from Paris to Moscow, a celebrity which was also
an apotheosis. But of this tardy recognition of his
genius, Nietzsche knew nothing. In that quiet,
sunny house at Weimar, whither his mother and
sister had removed from Naumburg, lay the great
thinker and philosopher, enjoying on his verandah
the balmy air and the view of the hills of the
Thuringian Forest which dotted the horizon. His
great pleasure was to receive the visits of old and
well-loved friends, to hear them talk, and to listen
to music. His faithful disciple, Herr Peter Gast,
came over to Weimar to cheer him with music, and
the deep blue eyes of the invalid filled with tears and
his whole frame shook with emotion at the sound.
What were his thoughts as, on the beautiful spring
and summer evenings, he used to watch the sun
slowly sink beneath the horizon in a glow of crimson
glory ? He seemed to have a faint recollection of his
former life of thinker. '' Did not I, too, write good
books ? " he asked once of his sister, as she placed
a new book in his hands. Towards his sister, who
nursed him with a rare devotion, his gratitude was
very touching. All those who visited him were
moved by this affection, which he constantly showed,
as well as by the beauty of that lofty forehead and
of those deep blue eyes, which illness seemed only to
have made more beautiful. Professor Lichtenberger,
in his most excellent introduction to the philosophy of
Nietzsche, describes thus the impression left on him :

THE LIFE OF NIETZSCHE 55

'' La souffrance et la maladie avaient, sans doute,
marque leur empreinte sur la physionomie de
Nietzsche, mais sans la degrader, sans lui enlever
sa noblesse. Son front restait toujours admirable,
son regard, qui semblait comme ' tourne vers le
dedans,' avait une expression indefinissable et pro-
fondement emouvante. . . . Dans tous les cas, il
avait conscience de Taffection dont sa soeur Fentou-
rait ; il ne cessait ne la suivre des yeux lorsqu'elle
allait et venait dans la chambre, et rien n'etait
touchant, quand elle s'asseyait pres de son fauteuil,
comme le geste gauche et lent par lequel il s'efforcait
de prendre dans sa main la main de cette soeur,
confidante, jadis, de ses annees de jeunesse, supreme
consolatrice, aujourd'hui, de ses annees de declin/' ^

In the room below that occupied by the invalid,
Frau Forster-Nietzsche, aided by a few devoted
friends of the master, were busily sorting, reading,
arranging the numerous papers, manuscripts, diaries,
correspondence, etc., left by the master, and destined
to be published as posthumous works. And above
lay the master himself, unconscious of the noise
now being made around his name, dying slowly and
nobly, unaware of his apotheosis.

The end came peacefully, gently, on the 25th of
August 1899. A fresh paralytic stroke fell, a long
sleep ensued, the expression on his face changed
slightly — a faint agitation, a long breath, and the
master fell into the last sleep, that which knows no
awakening. The bold fighter, the brave explorer of
the paths of knowledge, the intrepid searcher after
truth, had entered the haven of peace at last.

^ H. Lichtenberger : " Friedrich Nietzsche : Aphorismes et
Fragments choisis," Introduction (Paris, 1902).

CHAPTER II

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL

The temperament of Nietzsche was in some respects
well suited to the philosophy of Schopenhauer and
to the drama of Wagner ; for Nietzsche was of a
melancholy disposition, at times; he was nervous,
he willingly exaggerated and was willingly aggressive.
He knew in all its bitterness the pang of regret which
every man worth something must experience at some
time or other in the course of his life, the pang caused
by the separation from men and from ideas which are
dearly loved and cherished and revered. Nietzsche
was of a melancholy disposition at times ; for instance,
at the time of the separation from Wagner, or in
*' Menschliches, Allzumenschliches," or in " Der
Wandrer und sein Schatten,'' or in some of his cor-
respondence with his sister and with intimate friends.
And this melancholy is a feature of all refined and
sensitive natures, especially as such natures are prone
to see the world more or less through a prism — that
of their own ideal — and the disappointment is the
more cruel in proportion as the idealised world finds
itself out of harmony with the world of reality. But
it is only at times that Nietzsche is melancholy. The
basis of his nature, or its principal part, is composed
of cheerfulness, of optimism, and of a somewhat
aggressive spirit which made of Nietzsche a hard and
bold fighter.

During the first thirty years of his life Nietzsche

56

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL 57

worshipped conceptions which he fancied to be in
harmony with his own conception of Ufe. That con-
ception must always have been aristocratic, and was
certainly always artistic. His long contact with the
Greeks gave him a clearer idea of that personal con-
ception, it showed him a great civilisation in which
he recognised, or thought to recognise, his own ideal of
life as being the prevalent one. His study of Greek art,
of Greek philosophy, of Greek drama, not only enabled
him to attain to a clearer conception of the Hellenic
culture, but it was destined to have most important
effects on his intellectual evolution and on his con-
ception of life in general.

Nietzsche saw a civilisation in which life was
glorified, in which life was regarded as sacred, as
beautiful, as possessing a supreme value over and
above all other things ; in which life was regarded as
possessing a supreme value because it is the means of
creating art and beauty, which art and beauty are the
reflections of the boundless power and possibilities of
life. The Greeks loved beauty, and the symmetry of
forms, and the gracefulness of attitudes ; they loved
strength and power ; and they combined beauty and
symmetry and strength and power in the deities of
Olympia. But the Greeks were also immortal ; but
immortal in the sense of loving life so as to wish for
life eternal, so as to wish for life in all its plenitude,
in all its possibilities, for the integral life, which is
above and beyond the mere fact of individual life, and
needs for its adequate expression the whole of creation.
These Dionysian and ApoUinian visions of the world
were combined in Olympia, which was at once the
expression of the power and beauty of life, and also
of its continuity throughout the ages, of its essential
identity over and above the world of phenomena.

58 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Schopenhauer had preached the negation of all
wish to live as the highest wisdom. Nietzsche had
admired Schopenhauer ; but he had admired him
chiefly as being the pitiless destroyer of that flat and
Philistine optimism which prevailed very extensively
in German philosophy about the middle of the century,
and which was one of the many bad results of the
influence of Hegel. Finding himself in the presence
of a great and ancient civilisation, whose ideal is the
aflirmation of the most intense life, Nietzsche rejected
Schopenhauer. His own ideal was the affirmation of
life ; he must have misunderstood Schopenhauer ;
but in any case he came to recognise that Schopen-
hauer's teaching was not in accordance with the
Nietzschean ideal. Nietzsche discovered his real self,
that which had always been his real self, in contact
with the Greeks.

^^ The Apollinian conception of life finds its concrete
expression in the work of the sculptor, whose object
is to create beauty, and to give us types of beauty
which shall raise us above ourselves, which shall give
a value to life, which shall create for us a perspective
in which we see the possibilities of our own creative
faculty, and so incite us to regard life as sanctioned
and dignified by the sole creative power of the artist.

^The Dionysian conception finds its concrete expression
in the aspiration of the musician, the most lofty aim
of all music being to awake in us a love of life because
it is strong, and, being strong, also and necessarily
eternal. There is no contradiction between Apollo,
the god of beauty, and Dionysus, the god of strength
and of overflowing life. For the Greeks beauty was
synonymous with strength and power. That which
was strong and powerful and affirmative was also
beautiful. Beauty being the raison-d'etre of life.

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL 59

and the creation of beauty its sole justification, it
followed that only the existence of a race which was
strong and powerful, which knew how to dominate
and to organise, could afford a justification of life.

And the Greeks were precisely a strong race, who
knew how to dominate and to organise, Let there be
no mistake as to the real meaning of the Athenian
republic, a republic governed by ten thousand
" aristos " who commanded a nation of subjects and
slaves. The political, colonising and administrative
activity of the Greeks, activity always bent on con-
quering and subjugating, whether it be rival states or
the highest riddles of the universe, shows us the in-
fluence of the Dionysian conception on the daily life
of the race ; and the art, the immortal art of the age
associated with the name of Pericles, art which entered
into the daily life of the inhabitants and stimulated
that life to ever-increasing activity, is the result of the
Apollinian conception.

By dint of their strength, the Greeks were able to
raise themselves above pessimism ; and they were able
also to raise themselves above mere optimism, and to
confound pessimism and optimism in a higher state
which witnessed the resolution of the antinomy of the
two. The supreme proof of that strength is to be seen
in Greek tragedy. In its personages, Greek tragedy
realised the Apollinian conception of life, of life as
synonymous with beauty. In the choir of satyrs, it
realised the Dionysian conception, life conceived as
synonymous with strength and power. The tragedy
proclaimed at once the beauty of life, and the exuber-
ant power of life, desiring eternity for the realisation
of its infinite possibilities.

And the faculty thus revealed by the Greeks, of
being able to contemplate with serenity the sufferings

60 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

and woes of life, proves the strength, both physical and
moral, of the race. For the Greeks did not seek to con-
ceal the sight of life's sufferings, in order to lull them-
selves into an optimistic conception of life. They did
not merely succeed in contemplating life's sufferings
with serenity and calm. They went further and they
considered the exhibition, the frequent exhibition, of
suffering and pain to be a necessary factor in the
combat against optimism, as essential to an under-
standing of the real value of life, as a counterblast to
undue optimism. They went further still, and they
considered the sight of suffering and pain as adding to
the value and to the beauty of life. They contem-
plated suffering and pain in the light of an aesthetic
manifestation of the universal Will of which all life is
but the manifestation. After enjoying the sublimity of
the Olympian vision of the beauty and strength and
eternity of life, the Greeks liked to renew their force
by a contemplation of life under its diametrically
opposite aspects, they liked to renew their vigour by
going once more to the source of life, which is suffering.
And this suffering and pain and hideousness, they
considered as the justification of the Olympian
vision ; and they considered the Olympian vision as
justifying the pain and suffering which accompanied
its creation, and as being justified by them. For
what reason possess suffering and pain ? Their only
justification, which is also their supreme justification,
is that they incite us to create beauty, that they are
necessary and indispensable to the creation of beauty,
that without them beauty could not be created, for
beauty does but exist by reason of its antithesis,
and thus do suffering and pain become the raison-
d'etre of the creation of beauty, which is the
raison-d'etre of life. We flee from the sight of so

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL 61

many horrors, and we create for ourselves works of art
and of plastic beauty in order to escape from these
horrors. And the pain and suffering which is the
accompaniment of the whole world-process is also
the material with which beauty and art are created.
Through them our love of life as synonymous with
beauty and with strength is intensified. Through
them we realise the vision of life in beauty, of life in
power, of life exuberant and overflowing with wealth,
wealth of beauty and wealth of power, and needing
eternity in order to realise that wealth.

And the whole conception of life which is Nietzsche's
is realised in this conception, which was that of the
Greeks. Nietzsche is an artist, and as an artist he
sees life as a manifestation of beauty ; he sees life as
synonymous with the will of power, of domination ;
and this will of power, realised by the Greeks in their
conquering activity in all domains, is itself but the
Repression of the love of Ufe, of the affirmation of life,
of the wish to live and to live wholly.

Arrived at this point, Nietzsche realised that this
conception of life was likely to be criticised on the
score of its being a conception which can only pene-
trate the few, the select few. And it is certain that
the Dionysian conception of life is the antithesis
of a democratic one. The creation of beauty is
the work of the elite and of the elite only ; and the
strength of mind and body which reveals itself in the
ability to contemplate the sufferings of life, as being
necessary to the creation of beauty, can but be the
privilege of the few ; and that view of life which
considers suffering as necessary to the creation of
beauty, which considers art as the sole justification of
life, and which holds that the greater the suffering.

-y^

/f

62 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

both in amount and in intensity, the greater the beauty
in amount and intensity, is not Hkely to be appreci-
ated by that vast majority who are called upon to
suffer and to die in order that the minority, the
elite, may be able to enjoy all the more the con-
templation of their artistic creations. For suffering,
Nietzsche says, after Schopenhauer, is the basis of
all life ; it is, in fact, the only reality in life. The
artistic creation, which culminates in the Apollinian
and Dionysian visions, is the only means of emanci-
pating us from suffering, and consequently from
pessimism. We take refuge from suffering in art and
in beauty. But, even as life is thus rendered beautiful
as a supreme creation of art, so does the creation of
art require suffering as a primordial factor. The only
means of escaping ourselves from pessimism and
suffering is thus the infliction of suffering on others,
for art cannot exist without its antithesis.

Such a conception of life presupposes the existence
of an elite, of a minority, strong and powerful,
which dominates the rest of humanity. And the
Greeks had realised the necessities of logic, and they
had established the rule of an elite over a republic
of slaves and subjects. Nietzsche, too, understood
whither the necessities of logic led him. The creation
of beauty as the justification of life ; and the existence
of suffering as a primordial condition in that creation ;
this necessitated the rule of an elite. And the
existence of this elite is further justified by the fact
that its members alone are capable of creating beauty,
that they alone are strong enough to surmount the
trials of life and to take pleasure in the contemplation
of those trials.

The existence of a strong, dominating race, in
whom and by whom is realised the Dionysian and

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL 63

ApoUinian conceptions of life ; who, by its strength,
and consequently by its beauty, is naturally called
upon to govern humanity ; the existence of such a race
can alone ensure the existence of those conditions
without which life would be but a universal wail,
without object, without justification. Such a race
creates the conditions in which life is rendered toler-
able ; it creates the conditions in which life is ren-
dered fruitful and beautiful and strong. It creates
beauty, and in so doing it creates those ideals, which
are at the same time visions of its own infinite
possibilities, which give a value and a meaning to life.
But in order that a race may create beauty, may
create those conditions under which we first apperceive
the value of life, in which we first can desire life, it is
indispensable that certain antecedent conditions
should already exist. The first of these antecedent
conditions is the existence of suffering. Only as we
become aware of the intensity of human suffering can
we wish to create an artistic vision which shall be its
antithesis. Only as we become aware of the intensity
of suffering is there a possibility of realising its
antithesis. The justification of a ruling race is the
justification of humanity, for it is the duty of that
race to create the values which give a value to life,
which give a meaning to life. And that race, by its
strength, is itself, and in itself, an aesthetic mani-
festation of the highest order. For, if it can create
beauty, it is because it is strong, because it has an
excess of vitality which permits it to surmount
pessimism and suffering. And its vitality can be
maintained only on condition that it is rendered hard,
and it is rendered hard by the sight of suffering.
Suffering is thus necessary, it is indispensable, both
as the inspirator of artistic creation, and as main-

64 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

taining the vitality essential to that artistic creation,
which is the result of a superabundance of life.

Such is Nietzsche's conception of art. And
Nietzsche's conception of art contains all Nietzsche.
He differs profoundly on this subject from his erst-
while master, Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, art
is the means of escaping for a while, for a short time,
from the tyranny of the desire of life. For a brief
moment we stand, entranced and as if in ecstasy
before the product of artistic creation, and during
that moment we are uplifted above ourselves, we are
uplifted to a higher sphere, in which we cease to desire.
We do not, indeed, in this condition, consciously form
a positive wish to be delivered from the desire of life,
which positive wish is the highest wisdom ; but we
negatively cease to desire life for a brief moment, for
a while the ardent flame of desire is quenched, and in
this quenching of the thirst for life lies, according to
Schopenhauer, the value of art. But even as Schop-
enhauer considered art as possessing a value only so
far as it acts in a nihilistic sense, in so far as it extin-
guishes in us the desire to live, so does Nietzsche
consider the value of art as residing in it as a great
stimulant of life. Art is what alone gives a value to
life, what alone gives it a meaning, without which life
would not be possible, or would be possible only as an
endless purgatory. '' Art is the great stimulant of
life ; how can one say of art that it has no object, no
purpose, how can one understand it as ' Tart pour
Tart ' ? One question remains ; art brings with it
much that is ugly, hard and questionable — does not
art, therefore, suffer from life to this extent ? . . .
But this is the pessimistic view : one must appeal
from it to the artists themselves. What does the

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL 65

tragic artist communicate to us about himself ?
Does he not reveal to us precisely that condition in
which one stands without fear before the most terrible
and mysterious ? This condition is in itself of great
value ; he who knows it, honours it above all others.
The artist reveals it to us, he must reveal it, provided
he be an artist, and a genius for revealing himself.
Courage and the sentiment of liberty in the face of
a mighty enemy, of a dread-inspiring power, of a
problem which causes us to tremble — this victorious
condition is the one chosen by the artist, glorified by
him. In the face of tragedy, does all that which is
bellicose in our nature celebrate its saturnalia. He
who is used to suffering, he who seeks suffering, the
heroic man, celebrates his own existence in the Tragedy
— for the sake of this alone does the tragic artist
drink the cup of sweetest cruelty.'' ^

Thus art is the value of life ; and that life alone
is worth living which is a manifestation of art ; and
that life is a manifestation of art which is strong, which
is powerful, which is rich in vitality, which is exuber-
ant. But art brings much in its train which is not
artistic, much suffering, much pain, much cruelty,
many bitter tears. This is erroneous. Suffering,
pain, cruelty, tears are artistic ; and the strength of
the artist consists precisely in being able to contem-
plate suffering and cruelty from the standpoint of art,

^ " Werke," viii. 135, 136. " Die Tapferkeit und Freiheit
des Gefiihls vor einem machtigen Feinde, vor einem erhabenen
Ungemach, vor einem Problem, das Grauen erweckt — dieser
siegreiche Zustand ist es, den der tragische Kiinstler auswahlt,
den er verherrlicht. Vor der Tragodie feiert das Kriegerische in
unsrer Seele seine Saturnalien ; wer Leid gewohnt ist, wer Leid
aufsucht, der heroische Mensch, preist mit der Tragodie sein
Dasein — ^ihm allein kredenzt der Tragiker den Trunk dieser
siissesten Grausamkeit."

£

66 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

in being able to contemplate them as beautiful, as
artistic in themselves, as essential pieces in the great
edifice of beauty. Without them, art would not be.
And the greater the suffering the greater the develop-
ment of artistic creation. And as the intensity of
artistic creation is the condition of life, as life finds its
justification in art, as the object of life is to expand
and develop in beauty, in ever greater beauty, so does
life require suffering, and much suffering, and much
intense suffering.

And Nietzsche preaches to us the necessity of
becoming hardened, of inflicting suffering, of being
able to witness the most terrible suffering, with seren-
ity, nay with joy, of being able to inflict and witness
suffering in order to be able to taste the more keenly
the joys of that artistic creation and of that artistic
destruction, which is itself a fresh incitement to
creation, which embellish life. He tells us that the
great man, the truly great man, is not he who is full
of sympathy for his fellows, but he who is capable of
inflicting the cruellest suffering without heeding the
cries of his victim. The greatness of a man is to be
measured by his capacity to inflict suffering. It is
necessary to harden ourselves, to harden ourselves
greatly.

*' Why so hard ? asked once upon a time the piece
of kitchen coal of the diamond ; are we not near
relations ? — Why so soft ? O my brethren, that is
what I ask you : are you not — my brethren ?

'' Why so soft, so tender, so conciliatory ? Why is
such self-denial in your hearts ? Such little conscious-
ness of your Destiny in your look ?

'' And if you do not desire to be the messengers of
Destiny, and of an inexorable Destiny ; how can you
hope to triumph with me ?

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL 67

'' And if your hardness cannot shine forth and cut
and crush : how can you hope to create with me ? — All
creators are hard. And it must be a great joy to you
to mould the face of centuries as if it were wax, —

'* Joy, to write 3^our name on the will of centuries as
if on brass — harder than brass, nobler than brass.
That alone which is the hardest is also the noblest.

'' This new Table, O my brethren, I write above
you : Become hard ! '' ^

Thus life in beauty, in strength, and in power ;
and suffering and pain as necessary to the creation of
beauty, consequently to the glorification of life : this
is the message of Nietzsche. It is a message which is
distinctly pagan, and distinctly Hellenic, and dis-
tinctly Roman ; it is the message of the Renaissance ;
and it is a message which is distinctly anti-Christian,
anti-democratic, and suflSiciently Neronian to enable

1 <<

Werke," vi. 312. The original German, one of Nietzsche's
most striking passages, is as follows : —

'* Warum so hart ! — sprach zum Diamanten einst die Kuchen-
Kohle ; sind wir denn nicht Nah-Verwandte ? —

'^ Wanun so weich ? Oh meine Briider, also frage ich euch : seid
ihr denn nicht-meine Briider ?

" Warimi so weich, so weichend und nachgebend ? Warum ist
so viel Leugnung, Verleugnung in eurem Herzen ? So wenig
Schicksal in eurem Blicke ?

" Und wollt ihr nicht Schicksale sein und Unerbittliche : wie
konntet ihr einst mit mir — siegen ?

" Und wenn cure Harte nicht blitzen und schneiden und zersch-
neiden will : wie konntet ihr einst mit mir — schaffen ?

" Alle Schaffenden namlich sind hart. Und Seligkeit muss es
euch diinken, eure Hand auf Jahrtausende zu driicken wie auf
Wachs, —

" — Seligkeit, auf dem Willen von Jahrtausenden zu schreiben
wie auf Erz — Charter als Erz, edler als Erz. Ganz hart ist allein
das Edelste.

" Diese neue Tafel, oh meine Briider, stelle ich iiber euch :

WERDET HART ! "

38 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

us to conclude that Nietzsche must have been an
admirer of Nero.

All that which is tired and weak and nervous and
pessimistic and anaemic in life finds in Nietzsche its
deadliest enemy. And that which is exuberant and
gay and bold and intrepid and full of strength and of
the love of life finds in Nietzsche its fervent apostle.

According to Schopenhauer, the greatest crime in
life is the fact of living. According to Nietzsche
the greatest crime in life is sympathy. Sympathy
does not serve any purpose except that of increasing
the amount of suffering on earth without adding to
its beauty. Sympathy does not help him to whom
it is proffered ; but it drags down him who proffers
it to the level of the others. Sympathy adds to the
number of those who are miserable. It may prove,
and has indeed proved, exceedingly dangerous as an
instrument for impressing on the privileged classes
the notion of the injustice of their privileges, and
thereby sounding their death-knell. Zarathustra is
attacked by the vision of the Most Hideous Man, he
who is the symbol of all the miseries and all the
sufferings and all the ugliness of humanity, he who
has slain God himself, victim of the constant con-
templation of all the wounds and sores of stricken
humanity. And Zarathustra has a moment's
hesitation. The awfulness of the vision has taken
him aback. But Zarathustra vanquishes himself,
he thrusts the symbol of suffering humanity aside,
and goes further. It is the great victory, the
victory over his innermost self, the crushing out of
the feelings of sympathy and tenderness.

But it would be, perhaps, a mistake to suppose
that Nietzsche preached the doctrine of hardness and
cruelty for its own sake. Sympathy adds to the

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL 69

number of those who are miserable. Those who are
happy, and who love life, and who cherish life, are
liable to be rendered unhappy, are sure to be rendered
unhappy, are sure to turn against life, to declare
life a misery and a burden, by sympathising with
those who are miserable and who hate life because
they are miserable. For what is sympathy ? It
is the sharing of another's burden ; only this sharing
of the burden does not relieve any of the weight on
the shoulders of him who is miserable, while it
places a burden which was hitherto absent on the
shoulders of him who was up till then happy. So
that sympathy adds to the stock of ugliness and
suffering in the world. And Schopenhauer was
incontestably right when he saw in sympathy the
best means of attaining to that negation of the
desire to live, which he prized as the highest wisdom.
Sympathy reveals to us the depths of the world's
suffering, it inspires us with timidity in the face of
that suffering, with the consciousness of the non-
value of all life; it incites us to desire the cessation
of all life and the cessation of all desire. Sympathy
is thus an anti- vital sentiment. And it was but
natural that Nietzsche, the great apostle of life in
all its plenitude, should regard sympathy as a crime.
The predication of the gospel of life in all its
plenitude entails some consequences which Nietz-
sche foresaw. Firstly, the life which will assert
itself in all its plenitude must encounter no obstacles
which will hinder it in effecting this realisation ;
and if it encounters obstacles it must be able to
overthrow them. That is a condition precedent.
Secondly, when that condition has been realised,
life will affirm itself by all and every means ; by
war. " My brothers in war, I love you from my

70 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

heart, I am, and always have been, your fellow-
warrior. And I am also your best enemy. . . .
You should love peace as a means to fresh wars, and
the short peace rather than the long one. . . . You
say, a good cause sanctifies even war ; but I say,
a good war sanctifies every cause ! " ^ By war, and
by the infliction of suffering, and by the trampling
down of the weaker ; and by the creation of beauty,
and by the assertion of one's personality in every
domain of life, whether artistic, or intellectual, or
administrative, or political, or social.

And this affirmation of oneself, this expansion of
oneself, is but the affirmation of one's belief in life,
of one's love of life, which is the cardinal point of
Nietzsche's doctrine. During nineteen centuries
and longer, since Socrates and Plato, the affirmative
and expansive and exuberant life has been repressed,
every obstacle has been set in its way, every effort
has been made to prevent life from affirming and
expanding itself in all its boundless plenitude.
" There are many preachers of death, and the earth
is full of those whose extinction should be preached."
There are those who preach that life is not worth
living, that the world is a vale of tears ; and these
are those, and they are at present the great majority,
whose extinction should be preached and advocated.
For these preachers of death are the enemies of all life.
For death, as they understand it, is the antithesis of
life, the release not only from life but from all desire
to live, the nirvana in which those who are tired of life
and weary of life may take refuge and find repose.

But death, for him who loves life, who aspires to
have life beautiful, to have it powerful and exuberant
and strong, who loves life above all things, who loves

' " Werke," vi. 66, 67.

GENERAL VIEW OF NIETZSCHE'S IDEAL 71

life as a creation of art and on account of the possi-
bilities it affords of creating art and beauty, who
wishes for life eternally, because only in eternity can
the plenitude of its expansion be realised, for him
death is also something which partakes of the
beautiful and gay and optimistic. For if death be
indeed a token of the decay to which all individual
life is exposed, it is also a reminder of the eternity
of life over and above the accidents of this world of
phenomena. If death be a manifestation of decay, it
is also a manifestation of resurrection. The individual
will, with the force which it incarnates, is dead, but
the Universal Will, of which life and the world are but
emanations, exists still, exists eternally, symbol of the
desire of life, immortal and unquenchable.

*' The creator dies his death, triumphant, sur-
rounded by those who hope and praise. . . .

'* To die is the best ; but the next best is to die
in battle, in the full expansion of a great soul.

'' But that which the fighter, as also the victor,
hates, is that miserable death of yours, which steals
on you like a thief, but which nevertheless comes as
lord and master.

" I recommend you my own death, the death which
is free, which comes only when I will. . . .

*' Let your death be not a reproach to man and
to the world, my friends ; this I ask of the honey
of your soul.

*' In your death should your soul and your virtue
shine forth, like unto the evening glow of the sinking
sun, otherwise have you failed in your death.

'' And thus shall I die myself, so that you,
my friends, shall on my account love life more
greatly. . . ." ^

' '* Werke,'' vi. 105, 106, 108.

72 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Thus is death also a fresh means of loving life,
of affirming life. And thus also, from the heights
in which he soars, does Nietzsche embrace, in the
lyric gospel of the love of life which he preaches,
also that phenomenon which is generally considered
as the antithesis of life. Death shall sanctify life ;
death shall not be welcomed as a release from life ;
death shall, by its courage, by its intrepidity, by its
beauty, give a fresh proof of the beauty of all life,
and thereby increase our love of life.

It is impossible to go further in one's affirmation
of life, and of the supreme value of life. In this
brief general view of Nietzsche's position, a sketch
necessary in order to give us an idea of Nietzsche's
philosophy, we have shown that the cardinal doctrine
of Nietzsche is the lovejpf life, the affirmation of life
in all its plenitude and power, of life unrestrained
by any obstacles, expanding itself in force and in
beauty. And this affirmation of life contains all
Nietzsche, as we shall see. But we must now
examine Nietzsche's position with regard to the
various obstacles at present existing, and which
prevent an unrestrained expansion of life.

CHAPTER III

THE STATE

We have seen that the central point, the corner-
stone, of Nietzsche's philosophy, is a lyrical and
enthusiastic affirmation of life, of life beautiful,
strong, exuberant, overflowing, of life manifesting
itself in a thousand ways, in art, in social, intellectual,
political, administrative activity, of life in all its
plenitude and power. But many are the obstacles
to the realisation of this ideal ; and Nietzsche was
too intelligent not to see clearly these many obstacles,
and too loyal and sincere to pass them over in
silence. Nietzsche recognised the obstacles which
prevent the realisation of his ideal of the Over-Man,
with his superabundant vitality flowing over and
expending itself freely and without hindrance. He
recognised that all the institutions of the present day,
and some of them are ancient and venerable, and
most of them are considered to be axiomatic truths
— all these institutions he recognised as so many
obstacles preventing the fulfilment of his ideal.

But these institutions are no mere fortuitous
growths, having sprung up arbitrarily, or having
been imposed forcibly by some extraneous or extra-
natural power. They have their root deep down
in the habits, traditions, prejudices, of the race, and
are but the concrete manifestation of the psychology
of the race, which, in turn, is but a collective expres-
sion for the psychology of the individuals who com-

73

74 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

pose it. And many of the obstacles to the reaUsa-
tion of the ideal of the Over-Man are inherent in the
habits, traditions and prejudices of humanity.

For instance, that feeling of fear before the un-
known, that feeling of '' misoneism " as psychologists
term it ; what greater obstacle than this to the free
and unfettered exploration of the paths of know-
ledge ? But such free and unfettered exploration
of the paths of knowledge is a necessity to him who
would know the keenest joys, and also the keenest
sufferings, of life; consequently to him who desires
to live fully. But there is no doubt about this
general repugnance to a free and unfettered explora-
tion. The most unprejudiced minds still have their
prejudices. The scientist who, breaking loose from
the religious beliefs which have, perhaps, been his
in childhood, imagines himself to be a free and un-
fettered explorer after truths, to be a *' free thinker " ;
is he in reality so free ? Is he not still retaining
many of the prejudices of his childhood, his unwaver-
ing belief in the truth, for instance, or his respect
for the moral law as assumed in the Kantian impera-
tive ? Unknown, perhaps, even to himself, there
lingers a pertinacious dislike of adventure in the
research of knowledge, and an equally pertinacious
partiality for well-trodden paths, which present no
dangers, where the road is straight and the point of
arrival sure. Humanity does not like to explore
the virgin forests, which threaten the bold wanderer
with a thousand perils, unknown and unforeseen,
in which there are many chances against one that he
will miss his path and be lost in a hopeless maze.
This sentiment of fear before the unknown is a not
unnatural one, but it is an obstacle, and a serious
obstacle, to that free and unfettered search after

THE STATE 75

knowledge which is at once necessary to the emanci-
pation of man from the bonds which now enthral
him, and which is also necessary to the reaHsation
of life in its integrity.

Thus here at the very outset is already an obstacle,
and a very great obstacle, to be removed. Man
must shake off that fear of the unknown and un-
explored, he must gird up his loins and boldly explore
the mysterious labyrinth of knowledge ; he must
learn to shake off the prejudices accumulated by
centuries ; prejudices which, by the force of heredity,
have become part of his nature. He must unlearn
a great deal, indeed most, of what he has learned,
and which is merely error. But these errors and
prejudices which he must unlearn compose his most
sacred, his most cherished, his most firmly rooted
beliefs. He is called upon to throw off the burdens
of morality, of religion, of the State, and all other
obstacles to the realisation of his integral self.
And how many care to face the risk ? How many
care to wander through the labyrinths of the virgin
forest, or navigate amid the reefs of unknown seas,
in order to attain to the bottom of things ; if indeed
things have a bottom, or if that bottom only con-
tains something disagreeable, something repugnant,
or nothing at all ?

However the risk must be faced boldly. Man
must shake off his fear of the unknown, he must
carefully avoid the beaten track and plunge into
the unknown recesses of the forest. He knows not
what he may meet on the way, or where he will
arrive, or if he will indeed arrive at all. But he
will taste the pleasures, the incomparable pleasures,
as also the poignant anguish and suffering, which
alone are the lot of the explorer, of the Don Juan

76 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

of knowledge. Many and bitter will be his dis-
appointments and mortifications and deceptions,
but his will be also the vast joy of the man who
suddenly finds himself, who, like Rip Van Winkle,
awakes after a long sleep; of the man who has
consciousness of the expansion of himself and of
the realisation of himself during the search and by
the search. The sentiment of infinite liberty in the
face of the unknown, in the face of the most redoubt-
able problems, in the face of unknown dangers and
ambushes, is the sentiment of highest joy and
triumph ; it is the sanction of life, because through
it life is affirmed and glorified.

The concrete obstacles to the realisation of his
ideal, whether represented by the State, or by the
religions, or by the categorical imperative, or other-
wise, Nietzsche did not attack them separately,
in an orderly and methodical manner. He attacked
them all one after the other, or all together, without
method, violently.

First of all, we have the State. Nietzsche hates
the State, in which he sees an organisation dis-
covered by the masses for their protection and
defence against the strong, the exceptional, the
master. The State is synonymous with mediocrity
organised. Being the invention of the weak and
the inferior, it profits only the weak and the inferior.
It allows these latter to develop without let or
hindrance, without fear of the conqueror or the beast
of prey. Its aim is the suppression of the exception-
ally strong, of the exceptionally gifted. The logical
expression of the State is the Democracy, with
its absurd doctrine of equality.

When we come to examine the State, the modern

THE STATE 77

State, what do we find ? What is the precise aim
of the modern State ? The modern State aims at
enabUng the greatest number of men possible to
hve together peaceably in the best and happiest
conditions possible. The aim of the State is not the
development of the individual, nor the creation of
beauty, nor the cultivation of a superior race, nor
even the protection of the better and stronger
elements in a race ; the aim of the State is the
greatest possible multiplication of individuals ; its
aim is a regime of flat and mediocre happiness for the
greatest number of these individuals ; its aim must
necessarily be the suppression of all that which is
exceptional and superior to the mass, for that which
is superior to the mass revolts against the authority
of the latter as represented by the State. The
Biblical exhortation : '' Go forth and multiply,''
summarises the aim of the State. The mot
d'ordre of modern democracy : " the greatest hap-
piness of the greatest number,'' completes this
definition.

The State is the creation of the weak, and is
consequently in the service of the weak. '' The
State ? What is that ? I will open my ears, and I
will recount you the story of the death of nations.
The State is the coldest of all cold monsters. It
lies coldly ; and this is the lie which proceeds from
its mouth : ' I, the State, am also the People.'
But it is a He. They were creators, those that
created the different peoples, and gave them a faith
and an ideal ; and thus did they serve life. They
are destroyers and nihilists, those that set traps for
great numbers and call those traps the State ; they
hang a sword and a hundred passions above them.
There where a strong race still exists, the State is not

^

78 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

understood, and is hated as the evil eye and as a
crime against morals and liberty. . . . The State
lies with all the tongues of good and of evil ; and
whatever proceeds from it is a lie, and all that it
possesses is stolen. Everything connected with the
State is false ; it bites with stolen teeth, and its
very bowels are false.'' ^

Being an instrument designed to permit of the
greatest possible multiplication of individuals, the
State necessarily tends to favour the increase of
numbers of wholly superfluous persons :

'' The State is there where are all the drinkers of
poison, good and bad. It is there where all, good
and bad, loose themselves. It is there where the
slow suicide of all is termed ' life.'

'* Behold these superfluities ! They steal the work
of the discoverers, and the treasures of the wise.
They call their theft education — and everything in
their hands becomes illness and impotency !

'' Behold these superfluities ! They are for ever
ailing, they give vent to their spleen and call the
result their newspapers. They devour each other,
but cannot even digest each other.

'' Behold these superfluities ! They make wealth
and yet become poorer. They^desire power, and
first of all that condition precedent to all power —
money. . . .

'' There, where the State ceases to be, there begins
the man who is not superfluous. There, where the
State ceases to exist — behold, my brethren ! Do
you not see the rainbow and the bridge of the Over-
Man ? " '

It matters not whether the State be autocratic,

^ " Werke," vi. 69, 70.
^ Ibid. vi. 71, 72.

THE STATE 79

as in Persia, or democratic, as in Great Britain and
the United States. The State is always the enemy
of everything which is exceptional, of everything
which is powerful, of everything which rises above
the ordinary, of everything which is independent.
What it aims at is the multiplication and protection
of the inferior elements of the race, which elements
constitute its strength and guarantee its longevity.
The State loves correct attitudes, normality,
mediocrity.

And the proof of this is that all those who, in
modern times, have risen above humanity, and
dominated humanity, and ruled humanity with a
rule of iron, have either broken loose from all State
control, or else have used the machinery of the State
in order to assert their powers. The State is an ad-
mirable instrument in the hands of a Cesare Borgia,
or of a Peter the Great, or of a Napoleon. It is an
admirable instrument for dominating the mass of
humanity — and as such the great rulers of humanity,
from Alexander and Julius Caesar down to Frederic
and Napoleon, have always understood it — that
is to say, all those who belong to the mass, either
by reason of their weakness in *' physique,'' or on
account of their incompetency, or because of their
inability or hesitation to enter upon new paths and
forsake the beaten track, or for any other reason.
All these need the State for their protection ; for
the State protects them against exterior foes, and
protects them against themselves. The State acts
as do the religions, as a policeman who prevents the
bad instincts of the masses from breaking loose.

The position of Nietzsche with regard to the
State is fundamentally opposed to the position of
the anarchists, who also desire the abolition of the

80 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

State. The anarchists desire the aboHtion of the
State in order to do away with the power of the
governing classes, of the bourgeois and capitaHst
classes, in order to ensure to each worker the integral
value of his own production, iii order to do away
with the alleged exploitation of the industrious and
working classes by the capitalist and employers'
class. The condemnation of the State by Bakunin,
by Kropotkine, Reclus, Grave, and their disciples,
is a condemnation pronounced in the name of the
masses, pronounced against the alleged exploiters
of the masses, against those who have the reins of
power in their hands. According to the anarchist
theory, the State is the instrument of class domina-
tion, which theory is also that of Marx and the
different coUectivist schools. The State, according
to this theory, is the means whereby the capitalist
class is able to prolong its domination. The State,
still according to this theory, is the great obstacle
which prevents the realisation of the anarchist and
collectivist ideal — the ideal of universal fraternity
and solidarity.

Anyone even cursorily acquainted with Nietzsche
will at once recognise the total and fundamental
divergence of views which separates him from the
anarchist school. The latter has as starting point
the ideal of a humanity living in peace, fraternity
and solidarity, of a humanity whose unit, the
individual, is naturally good, naturally pacific, and
whose natural goodness and disinterestedness have
been momentarily destroyed by various influences,
of which the State is among the most important.
Nietzsche has as starting point the ideal of a
humanity living in strife and in war, of an Over-
Man dominating humanity by his strength, of an

THE STATE 81

Over-Man, type of the brute, strong, ferocious,
merciless ; he sees in man, not a creature naturally
good, but a creature naturally and essential vicious ;
he sees in the State, not the destroyer of man's
good qualities, but the destroyer of his passions and
of his vices, of that which is fundamental and which
is attractive in his nature. The anarchist school
hates the State as a symbol of power ; Nietzsche hates
it as a symbol of impotence. The anarchist school
heralds its downfall as the end of tyranny ; Nietzsche
sees in its downfall the means of establishing a
far greater tyranny, that of the Over-Man. The
anarchist school works against the State as an
instrument of class-domination and in the interests
of the masses ; Nietzsche thunders against the State
as an instrument for the protection and creation of
mediocrity, and in the interests, not of the masses,
whom he despises, but of the Over-Man.

It is therefore a very flagrant error to confound
Nietzsche with the anarchist school of theorists.
Both desire the downfall of the State, but both ap-
proach the question from totally different standpoints.
The anarchist conception of society is the exactly
diametrical opposite to that of Nietzsche. The
anarchist school desires the complete downfall of the
state, in order to inaugurate the era of anarchy. But
what is more precisely Nietzsche's position ?

In the first place, Nietzsche does not desire so
complete a downfall of the State, perhaps, as we might
imagine. Nietzsche is essentially and primordially
an autocrat, and so far as the State represents
Authority — that is to say, so far as the State represents
the Will of Power, the will to dominate — Nietzsche
is perhaps willing to accept it. But, you reply,
this is precisely what the State does represent. The

82 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

State is the symbol of authority versus anarchy, and
the anarchists are logical in wishing to bring about its
downfall, but Nietzsche is less logical in wishing the
same thing.

But this argument shows a misunderstanding of
Nietzsche's conception of authority, and also a mis-
understanding of what is meant by the authority of
the State. And indeed Nietzsche's conception of the
State is intimately bound up with his whole philo-
sophical teaching. Nietzsche, we must remember, is
an autocrat, and an enemy of the democratic ideal.
But Nietzsche is more than a mere autocrat. He is an
' autocrat who aims at the establishment of an auto-
cracy which shall govern by reason- of its strength, by
reason of its power, by reason of the terror and awe
and respect, and also veneration, which it inspires.
The autocracy which Nietzsche sees as the ideal of
the future shall be one in which rigid exclusiveness
prevails ; in which admittance to its ranks shall be
dependent on the strength, the prowess, the courage,
the intelligence, the anthropological superiority, of
each member ; in which each shall be free to develop
himself to the utmost degree, in boundless freedom,
or almost boundless, at anyrate in a freedom to which
the only limits are those set by his own strength and
capacity. The Nietzschean autocracy shall be one
to which only the fittest shall be admitted, a narrow
circle composed of the elect alone, of those who are the
creators of the values which humanity worships, and
each member shall conquer admittance only by his
deeds ; but the deeds which shall gain for him
admittance shall be deeds of daring and prowess, both
intellectual and physicaV\vhich no State could permit,
for it is such deeds as these which destroy the State
and falsify its aim and raison-d' etre. '' In our

THE STATE 83

present civilised world we know only the degenerate
criminal, crushed by the hostility and contempt of
society, the criminal who distrusts himself, who often
seeks to belittle and excuse his act — ^in short, a type
of criminal who has failed ; and we forget that every
great man was a criminal, only not in miserable style,
but in great style — we forget that every great act is
a crime." ^ The great man of the future, he who is
alone worthy to be a master and a ruler of men, who
is alone worthy to enter the ranks of the autocracy
of the Over-Men, he must necessarily be a criminal —
that is to say, a man who knows not good and bad,
because he is above them ; a man who is the scourge
of humanity ; who, in order to realise the expansion
of his personality, needs humanity as a field for
experiments, as a field in which he can sow suffering
broadcast, for every great man needs to inflict suffer-
ing, for every great man is warlike and hard-hearted
and needs great hecatombs in order to attain his object.
The aim of the Over-Man is a great aim, and it is the
realisation of life in its entirety, in all its infinite
possibilities ; and, in the great game which the Over-
Man plays with Destiny, humanity is but a pawn.

Such is the authority which Nietzsche would set
up, an authority of blood and iron, dominating
humanity by its strength, by the awe and veneration
which that strength inspires, an authority which has
attained its position through countless hecatombs,
through tears and suffering, which has posed the
greatest and deepest problems which confront the
human mind and resolved them, which has lived
through perils innumerable and which has through its
perils become hardened, become fitted to occupy the
position which it occupies, that of creator of the tables

Werke," xv. 355.

1 «'

84 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

of values which shall constitute the faith of the world.
The autocrat of the future, the Over-Man, is the
embodiment of strength and beauty, who is beautiful
in his strength, and who is strong enough to give full
vent to all his passions, and also strong enough to
restrain those passions, and to prevent them from
flowing over and destroying life.

It ensues that the autocracy of Nietzsche will exist
not by any means for the benefit of humanity at
large, for it will be a scourge to humanity, for it will
be the master with the iron glove, and humanity will
be the slave and the drudge. Thus alike by its final
aim, by its composition, and by its immediate aims,
this autocracy will be the exact opposite of all con-
temporary states, whether autocratic or constitu-
tional. Its final aim will be itself and its own
development in strength and in beauty ; its com-
position will be that of the most elect : of the fittest
of the fit, of the bravest of the brave, of the strongest
of the strong ; and its immediate aim will be the
exploitation and scourging of humanity as the chief
means to its own consolidation.

If we turn now to the State of to-day, whether it
be autocratic or constitutional, we find at once that
every act which qualifies for admittance into the
autocracy of to-morrow is condemned. The State of
to-day is essentially moral ; while the Over-Man is
nothing if not profoundly immoral. The object of
the State is not the creation of beauty, nor the
development of individual power and independence.
Its object is the development of mediocrity ; its
object is the creation of a flat, colourless ideal of
uniformity, which is certainly not beautiful, and
which is certainly not the symbol of strength. The
aim of the State is the " good " man, the '' correct ''

THE STATE 85

man ; its ideal is the staid man of business, or the
placid and conservative '' bourgeois '' who lives on
his income and leads an honourable, a sedate, and
a quiet life. The State has its philosophy, which
inculcates respect of the law, of the moral law, and
enjoins the worship of the trinity of the Good, the
Beautiful and the True. The State is the enemy
of all initiative or independence. Whether it be
Russia or France, an absolute monarchy or a republic,
initiative and independence are considered by the
State as its most redoubtable foes. How could the
modern State accommodate a Julius Caesar or a Cesare
Borgia or a Napoleon ? These creators of their own
values, these dominators and tyrants of humanity,
were themselves the State, they were themselves
the incarnation of the Will of Power, they personified
Power under its most redoubtable aspect.

The State, however, is not redoubtable. The State
is not the creation of courage or of prowess or of great-
ness of any sort. The State has been created in
order to render the life of the greater number toler- .
able — ^that is to say, its object is the curbing and
eventual suppression of the passions which surge up
in the human soul and which threaten the peace and
good digestion of one's neighbour. The State needs
order and peace, and also the '* peace of mind.''

But the State represents a principle of authority,
you object ; and in order to obtain authority you
must have power. There is no such thing as authority
without power of some sort.

Certainly. The State possesses authority ; but
there are two sorts of authority. There is the
authority which is obtained by the superabundance of
force and energy, such as was realised, for instance,
in Napoleon. And there is the authority which is

86 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

obtained by all sorts of intrigues, of backstairs plot-
ting, of cunning tricks, of baseness and meanness and
slyness ; and such is the authority of the State.

The State proclaims itself moral, but it is in reality
profoundly immoral and disgustingly immoral. This
is a first proof of its weakness, of the mean and degen-
erate physique of those who control it ; for the great
sign of strength is to be able to proclaim oneself
immoral, at least to oneself. Napoleon gave himself
out as actuated by moral motives ; but that was
because humanity is too unintelligent to understand
the immoralist ; and to himself Napoleon also con-
fessed himself. But the rulers of the modern State
are full of self-deception ; they lie to themselves,
they deceive themselves deliberately, until they begin
actually to believe in themselves and in their virtue ;
they blind themselves with big words and pious
attitudes, and the reason for their deUberate self-
deception is that they are afraid to examine them-
selves to the bottom, afraid to look the truth in the
face. Here is a first proof of cowardice, of weakness,
and of hypocrisy.

Under cover of this *' tartufferie,'' the most
tortuous intrigues and plottings are carried on. Those
who, to-day, rule the State, or aspire to rule it, not
being strong enough, or courageous enough, or bold
enough, to assert their supremacy by strong, cour-
ageous and bold means, have resort to all sorts of
crooked and unclean methods. The democratic
State, with its shameless place-hunting and deception
of the electors, with its corruption and jobbery, is
typical of that sort of power which is represented
by the State. That power is acquired by means of
corruption and jobbery — is not the French republic
a striking instance ? — and he who employs the most

THE STATE 87

underhand methods, he who possesses the most
crooked brain, he who is most practised in the art of
unscrupulous intrigue, of backstairs plotting, and of
self-deception, he arrives at a goal and takes charge
of the helm of the State. The contests of political
parties, are they contests of principles or of per-
sonal ambitions, mean and sordid ? Incontestably
of the latter. The regime of democracy, with all its
scandals, has discouraged those who possess any real
value, those who are brave and who look upon the
interests of the race, and of the race of the future,
as the highest aim of activity.

The democratic State hates the great man, and the
absolutist State hates the great man, because the
great man is the redoubtable enemy who would do
away, and mercilessly, with all the place-hunters and
blood-suckers who, by means of tortuous intrigue,
hold at present the reins of power. The advent of
the great man means the death of the place-hunter.
And therefore the State proscribes the great man,
and outlaws him.

And how do they keep hold of their places, these
jobbers and intriguers ? By means of specious
promises — not to improve the condition of the race
by cultivating systematically its anthropologically
superior elements, oh no ! But by promises to the
mass, by luring on the mass, by holding out visions
of future happiness, by exciting the covetousness and
envy and hatred and malice of the mass. And thus
does the State become the greatest foe of progress,
thus does it seek to multiply the inferior elements at
the cost of the superior, for it is only in the inferior
elements that the State finds its support.

The results of the activity of the State have long
been manifest in Europe ; and biologists have re-

88 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

peatedly called attention to the growing degeneracy
of the race as the result of the policy consistently
pursued by those to whom is confided the responsi-
bility of governing. It is notorious that Darwin was
extremely pessimistic as to the future of the race, and
his views are also those of Galton, Vacher de Lapouge,
Sergi, Ploetz, and of all eugenists in Europe or America.
'* If we grant that this struggle for existence really
does exist — and as a matter of fact it sometimes
does occur — its results unfortunately are the exact
opposite of those which the Darwinist school desires,
and which one ought to desire with it. The struggle
results generally in the discomfiture of the strong, of
the favoured exceptions. The race does not increase
in strength ; its weaklings are always triumphant
over its strong men, because the former are more
numerous and more clever. Darwin forgot to reckon
with the intellect ('' Geist ''). . . . The weaklings
possess greater intelligence. ... I understand by
intelligence, as it is easy to see, slyness, cautiousness,
patience, deceit, great self-possession, and everything
which we call mimicry ; to this latter a large part of
our so-called virtue belongs.'' ^

To sum up : the State is a creation of the weaker
elements of the race who, by dint of their greater
cautiousness, slyness, deceit, trickery and self-
possession, have succeeded in outmanoeuvring the
stronger and fiercer elements. The State is the
instrument of protection of these weak and treacher-
ous elements. The power in the State is represented
by those among the inferior race who have succeeded
in outwitting and outdeceiving their competitors.
The rule of the State is the rule of jobbers and place-
hunters, who need peace and order and quiet in order

> " Werke," viii. 128.

THE STATE 89

that they may pursue their labours undisturbed ; and
who, in order to keep the power in their hands, are
forced to resort to all manner of bribery, including
the holding out of visions of the future which appeal
to the worse passions of the masses, which tempt their
cupidity and excite their malice and envy. The
result of this dependence of the political place-holders
on the masses is the enactment of legislative measures
in the highest degree prejudicial to the well-being of
the race as a whole, prejudicial to individual liberty
and initiative, and prejudicial to social progress and
organisation.

The State, therefore, is one of the chief obstacles to
the realisation of that ideal of force, of beauty, and
of integral life which Nietzsche preached. Within
the precincts of the State, only the superfluous can
find place. There where the State ends, there begins
the great man, the Over-Man, who can, indeed, seize
the helm of the State and say with Louis the Four-
teenth: ''L'etat c'est moi"; but in so doing he places
himself outside the State, above the State, and uses
the State in order to assert his own power and domin-
ation. Then, and then only, does the State become
a symbol of the Will of Power.

CHAPTER IV

THE MORAL LAW

The State is one of the great obstacles to the reaUsa-
tion of Nietzsche's ideal. But the State itself is not
an accidental growth. It is the expression of the
Will of Power, but of the Will of Power of an inferior
race, which seeks to assert itself by underhand and
tortuous means. But the State is, as it were, but
a secondary expression of the Will of Power ; its
justification, in the eyes of those who defend it on
sociological grounds, is not that it is the means
of exploiting the working classes at the expense of
the mercantile '' bourgeoisie,'' ^ its justification, its
ultimate justification, is a purely moral one. The
institution of the State is the best means, if not the
sole means, of preserving law and order, and —
morality.

All our social institutions are, in final resort,
reducible to moral institutions. The State — the
Law — the Constitution — the People's Charter — are
all expressions of a desire to live in harmony with
the moral law. Some anthropologists — ^for instance,
Quatrefages — have gone so far as to assert that man
is a religious animal ; which means that man is a
moral animal, moral by nature, by instinct, by birth.
Immorality is thus a crime against nature.

And it is a fact that every philosophical, social

^ F. Bninetiere : ** Sur les Chemins de la Croyance. Premiere
fetape. L'Utilisation du Positivisme," p. ii (Paris, 1905).

90

THE MORAL LAW 91

and other system which has been invented, from
Socrates to Renouvier, has been a system based on
morahsm. However divergent on other points,
everyone has been agreed as to the existence of
the moral law and as to the necessity of obeying
that law. The monistic materialism of Haeckel
and Biichner is quite as rigid on this point as the
" Imitatio Christi/' Whether orthodox or heterodox
in matters of religion, certain it is that every thinker,
or every thinker with, perhaps, the exception of the
pre-Socratian Hellenic philosophers and of Max
Stirner in the middle of the nineteenth Christian
century — every thinker, with these exceptions, has
been orthodox with regard to the moral law. This
law, mysterious, undefined and intangible, has been
the arbitrator to which all causes have appealed,
whose decision is final and irrevocable. The
*' Rechtsstaat '' of Kant and Fichte is grounded on
the principle that the individual shall be regarded
as an end in himself and not as a means, which is
a distinctly moral principle. The whole school of
classical liberalism is based on a moral basis. Every
party, every social system, every philosophy, when
wishing to justify itself, seeks to show that its
doctrines are the most in harmony with the moral
law. And, as a matter of fact, that system which is
considered to contain the strongest dose of moralism
is also held to be the most justified.

All this belief in a moral law, in a categorical
imperative, is based on the belief that, as M. Ferdin-
and Brunetiere expresses it, '' truth is something
exterior to us and above us, removed by its very
definition from the fluctuations of personal opinion."
The Moral Law is exterior to man, and superior to
him. Over and above the world of nature is super-

92 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

jDOsed the moral world, the world of " SoUen/' the
world of the categorical imperative. The world
of morals dominates the world of nature ; and the
history of the evolution of the world is, in a sense,
the history of the conflict between these two worlds,
humanity becoming civilised in the measure that
the world of morals asserts its supremacy, and
relapsing into barbarism whenever the world of
nature gains the upper hand.

Man is perpetually torn by the contest within him.
On the one hand, his natural instincts and passions
seek to assert themselves, refuse to be suppressed,
and fight for existence. On the other hand, these
natural instincts and passions are perpetually
opposed by the mysterious voice of conscience, that
terribly talkative personage which moralists have
invented in order to represent the moral world.
Every time a natural instinct or passion of man
seeks to assert itself, it finds itself opposed by a
*' still, small voice " which murmurs : '* That is
immoral, therefore it is wrong.'' Thus is morality
a sort of counter-balance to nature.

As long as morality was connected with religion,
its imperative was less flagrantly absurd. For man,
doubtless realising the abnormal position which he
occupied, he, grain of matter or speck of dust, being
opposed, as a moral creature, to the boundless and
immoral universe, invented another world, which he
imagined in the likeness of this present world, only
superposed to the latter, only far greater, because
eternal, because creator of the world of nature in
which he lives. And thus the balance turned to the
advantage of himself and of the moral world ; for
the latter being represented by a fraction of the
natural world, and by the whole of the supernatural

THE MORAL LAW 93

world and its supernatural powers, was the only
world which counted for aught. By this means
the world of nature was rendered despicable, was
belittled, calumnied, represented as the work of
the '' Powers of Darkness,'' while the moral world,
with its supernatural sanctions, overwhelming and
overshadowing the natural world, became the '' real "
world.

The task of Christianity, which identified the
good with the divine, and which taught that every-
thing good came from God, and everything evil
from the devil — that is to say, from the world of
nature which is the devil's creation — was thus ren-
dered easy. And in truth the moral law requires a
supernatural sanction. We have only to compare the
Gospels, which can be understood of every child,
with the laborious and herculean efforts of Kant, in
order to understand the difficulty of establishing what
the French call '' une morale laique " on a firm basis.

However, we will pass over the religious aspect of
the question, which will be discussed later on, and
confine ourselves to the morale laique — that is to
say, to the moral law without supernatural sanction
of any sort, which pretends to find its basis either in
the human conscience, or else attempts its justifica-
tion as a sociological necessity, pure and simple.
And, in truth, it is seldom that an attempt is made
nowadays to prove the existence of the moral law
on purely theological grounds. Even the professed
apologists of the various religious beliefs are aware
of the extremelv unstable nature of those beliefs,
and are glad to find some more solid foundation for
morality than the existence of God. For theologians
in distress, as well as for all those who, although
rejecting openly supernatural beliefs, nevertheless

94 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

cling to their belief in morality and in the moraJ
law as a last remnant of the old faith, Kant, with
his '' Critique of Practical Reason/' has proved a
welcome benefactor.

What Nietzsche claimed to do was to place him-
self above and beyond the moral law, above and
beyond the good and the bad. From this objective
standpoint he claimed to have reversed all the tables
of values which humanity has worshipped up till
now, and to substitute for them his own new tables,
whose laws should be the opposite of those pro-
claimed by the lawgivers of past times and up till
the present day.

Immoralism is the basis of Nietzsche's creed, and
yet Nietzsche is compelled to admit the existence
of certain rules which govern human society ; and
the best proof of this is that he arrives at the estab-
lishment of two distinct systems of morals : that of
the masters and that of the slaves. But we must
admit that Nietzsche's new table of values which he
would substitute for the one prevailing at the present
moment, may fairly claim to be a table of immoral
values. For, if we admit that sympathy, respect
for the rights of others, goodness of heart, are
" moral " qualities, it is incontestable that hard-
ness, cruelty, contempt for the supposed rights of
the weaker, are immoral.

Another question is that of Nietzsche's originality.
Evidently Nietzsche is not the first philosopher to
question the validity of the Kantian imperative, with
its notion of absolute and immutable duty. To
take only one example, Nietzsche's own master,
Schopenhauer, had made a luminous and exhaus-
tive critique of the Kantian imperative. But

THE MORAL LAW 95

Schopenhauer had admitted, and very distinctly
preconised, the value of morality and the necessity
of morality for humanity. But this is precisely what
Nietzsche calls in question, and the fundamental
problem of the value of the very notion of morality
itself is his starting point. '' Morality has been the
neutral territory on which, in spite of all mistrust,
disagreement and contradiction, one has met in
common accord ; it is the sacred haven of peace,
where philosophers and thinkers rest from their
efforts, where they breathe and live again," he
declares in the " Gaya Scienza.'' But Nietzsche
has " circumnavigated the idealist lake '' and dis-
covered new lands, far removed from this neutral
territory of morality. '' We nameless, unprece-
dented, almost incomprehensible early products
of a future which is still a riddle — we need a new
means to a new end — namely, new health, better,
stronger, more resisting, merrier health than that
which has prevailed up till now. He whose soul
longs to have made acquaintance with all the values
and all the desires which humanity has nursed up
till now, who longs to have circumnavigated this
idealist lake, who wishes to learn from his own
experience, as is fitting in a conqueror and explorer
of Ideals ... he must first of all possess robust
health — robust health, such as one must always
conquer and reconquer, because one must also
perpetually sacrifice it ! . . . And now, after having
been a long while on our journey, we Argonauts
of the Ideal, perhaps more courageous than clever,
often enough shipwrecked, and yet healthier than
our opponents could wish us — dangerously healthy,
in fact — it seems as if, as a reward, an undiscovered
Land, stands before our eyes, whose frontiers no one

96 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

knows, a land beyond all other lands, a world so
overflowingly wealthy in beauty, in strange things,
in mystery, in terrifying and also divine things, as
to excite beyond measure our curiosity and our
desire of possession/' *

But before this promised land of the future, this
Canaan of milk and honey, can be conquered, it is
essential that the moral prejudices which prevail
to-day should disappear. For what in reality is this
moral law of which philosophers are for ever talking,
and which is thrust on us at every moment until its
presence becomes an obsession ? It is certain that
the moral law first originated with man. The rest
of nature is absolutely and profoundly immoral.
So long as the old teleological conception of the
world-processes prevailed, so long as man was
opposed to nature, was represented as something
distinct from, and higher than, nature, it could be
asserted that man was a moral being. And, as a
matter of fact, the moral law finds its only true
sanction, its only reasonable sanction, in religion.
For, on the supposition that God exists, that a
supernatural world is above the world of nature,
and superposed to it, and dominating it, this super-
natural world could be held as representing, as
incarnating, the moral law ; and thus man '' created
in God's image," in the image of the world of morals,
is an essentially, and a primordially, moral creature ;
and thus also the world of morals, incarnated in the
Omnipotent Power of God, is the only world that
counts, this world of ours being a mere atom, a
mere passing fantasy of the omnipotent Power.

From this Biblical point of view, the explanation
of the moral law, and its justification, are rendered

' " Werke," v. 342, 343.

THE MORAL LAW 97

easy. The essence of man being moral, immorality
is contrary to man's essence, to that which is funda-
mental in his character, as well as being a sin against
his creator and benefactor. From this point of view,
also, the moral imperative is categorical and admits of
no discussion. In order to raise the moral law above
the fluctuations of personal opinion, and place it there
where alone its nature can be regarded as eternal, as
immutable, it is necessary to associate it with a higher
Power which is also eternal and immutable.

But the progress of exegesis has rendered this
basing of the moral law on alleged eternal and
immutable religious truth very dangerous ; and
all those who are far-sighted and clear-headed
enough to understand the consequences of modern
exegetical research on supernatural beliefs, are
anxious to seek some more solid foundation for the
moral law than a vanishing faith. To these persons,
as we have said, Kant has proved a benefactor, and
the success of Kant, as Nietzsche remarks, must
be attributed to the fact that the Konigsberg
philosopher was a theologian in disguise. Nietzsche
has understood Kant's work better than Heinrich
Heine understood it. He saw that the two volumes
of the ''Critique'' are not opposed to each other;
and he saw that, in the '' Critique of Pure Reason,"
Kant strove not only to demonstrate the impossi-
bility of attaining to any knowledge of the world
of noumena, but that by showing the insufficiency
of our sensible intuition, and by maintaining the
absence of any intelligible intuition, he also placed
the entities of the world of noumena — God, soul,
immortality — outside the reach of hostile criticism.
These entities, already sheltered from hostile
criticism by the " Critique of Pure Reason," are

G

98 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

subsequently reintroduced as postulates of Practical
Reason, as necessitated by the existence of the
categorical imperative, taken by Kant for proven
a priori.

But Kant's system of practical reason has long
been attacked on various sides. The most important
breaches in the system have been effected by the
utilitarian and evolutionist schools, and by Schopen-
hauer. Knowing as he did the work of Bentham and
John Stuart Mill, being himself a disciple of Schopen-
hauer, and following immediately on Spencer,
Nietzsche could hardly pretend to have been the first
to call in question the value of the Kantian imperative
with its characteristics of universality and universal
necessity. But the English utilitarians, he argued,
have contented themselves with a history of the
evolution of morals, without calling in question the
fundamental validity of the moral law itself. Further
they have given us a history of morals which is mis-
leading, which is unhistorical, and which is false and
unhistorical because these utilitarians have allowed
themselves to be blinded by prejudice, and have
identified everywhere the good with the useful, the
bad with the useless, which is incorrect.

But to return to our question. We do not propose
to examine here Nietzsche's own conception of the
genealogy of morals or the value of the immoralist
doctrine. We are examining the obstacles which
Nietzsche finds in the way of establishing his ideal of
life in all its power and plenitude, of life overflowing
with exuberant vitality and seeking to manifest itself
and to expend its strength by all the means in its
power, by the creation of beauty, by the infliction of
suffering, by seeking to know all the secrets of life,
its joys and tears, its hopes and disappointments, its

THE MORAL LAW 99

adventures and hardships. And one of the chief
obstacles to the reaUsation of this ideal of super-
abundant life is the existence of the moral law.

The moral law signifies the subordination of man
to an external power, just as the religious law does.
Morality, as Max Stirner pointed out in '' Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum,'' is religion in disguise.
Nietzsche has no knowledge of Stirner's work, nor
does he appear even to have heard of Stirner or of
that curious, rigorously logical and unanswerable
book '' The Unique and his Property,'' for we should
otherwise certainly find an elaborate eulogy of Stirner
in his works. But Nietzsche says a lot of what Stirner
said before him, as he has also said some things
which Renan and Taine, Flaubert and Stendhal in
the nineteenth. La Rochefoucauld in the eighteenth,
century have said. Stirner pointed out with merci-
less logic that the subordination of man to a moral
law is the subordination of man to an external power,
just as is the case with the religions. And this moral
law is something exterior to man, something alien
to man, for man is a part of nature, and nature is
profoundly immoral. The world of the supernatural
having been destroyed by modern exegetical research,
and the world of the supernatural being the raison-
d'etre of the world of morals, the world of morals
disappears also. For is it not ridiculous and unreason-
able to suppose man, an insignificant parcel of nature,
opposed to the whole of the rest of nature ? And
if we declare man to be the '' summit of creation "
what do we mean ? If we mean that man is the
centre of creation and the end of all creation, we fall
into the error of the geocentric theory, which supposes
this planet of ours to be the centre of the universe ;
we fall back into the teleological error, which supposes

100 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

a reason {" Zweck ") in the world-process, which sees
in the world-process the reflection of a conscious Will ;
and here are we back at the theistic point of view.
If, however, we mean that man is the most perfect
specimen of creation from the physical standpoint,
we are wrong on a matter of fact. Physically, man is
absolutely inferior to the carnivora, and if he possesses
any superiority it resides in his more developed
brain-power, which however does not at all com-
pensate for his physical inferiority. So that if we
accept the existence of a moral law, independent and
autonomous, unconnected with any theistic idea, we
arrive at the paradoxical result of opposing man, as
a moral creature, to the rest of nature, which is im-
moral.

But this is precisely what does distinguish man
from the brute, and from inorganic nature, you reply.
There is implanted in each one of us a moral law,
identical in its ultimate aim for all times and in all
places, and this moral law speaks to us through the
voice of conscience. Our conscience commands, and
we obey. We disobey, and our conscience tortures
us with its reproaches.

To this objection Nietzsche has replied by a
" critique " of the human conscience, which, although
scattered throughout his various books, forms a
whole, complete and rigorous. It is time for us to
examine this notion of conscience, and to put in
question its validity.

After examination we find, as a matter of fact, that
our '' conscience " is but another term for the accumu-
lation of all our instincts, whether these be derived
from heredity or from education or from habit,
which is a second nature. We have, all of us, accumu-
lated in our physical and mental constitution an

THE MORAL LAW 101

indefinite quantity of tendencies, which we call
congenital tendencies, which are derived from parents
and ancestors. These accumulated tendencies, which
cause us to resemble our parents and ancestors in a
degree more or less considerable, play a very import-
ant role in our mental as well as in our physical
life. In our physical life their influence is somatically
obvious. In our mental life their influence is not less
obvious, only it is necessary sometimes to search
for it. It is evident that ancestral influences must
be taken into account in judging of the value of
''conscience.'' The "conscience'' of one man, with
certain ancestral influences behind him, will be totally
different to that of another man conditioned by totally
different ancestral influences. One man is pious, one
is naturally disposed to the study of natural science,
another is brutal, another is of a delicate and refined
disposition, one is frank and candid, another is
ruse and Machiavellian ; one is full of exuberant life,
another is sickly and weak ; and the '' conscience " of
each — that is, his manner of thinking, of reasoning,
and of judging persons and things — will be shaped
accordingly.

And then the influence of education and of the
surrounding environment must be taken into con-
sideration. We cannot maintain that a hooligan,
brought up in an atmosphere of filth and vice, will
have the same conscience as a man brought up in the
home of an aristocrat of St James's. And the aristo-
crat of the West End is certain to have a conscience
quite differently formed to the conscience of a man
who has been brought up among the Quakers. But
these are extreme examples of a universal law. That
law is that no two men are alike ; that the differences
resulting from heredity and education, sometimes

102 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

reduced to a minimum, sometimes raised to a maxi-
mum, are always present and always active. And
how much of our supposed '' conscience " is merely
the result of heredity and education ? Here we
have two men, two friends. The one is religiously
disposed from childhood up ; he is educated in a
religious family ; he goes to Oxford, where religious
idealism is the prevailing sentiment ; he rarely, if ever,
travels, he is never taken away from the influence of
the family and home life. The other man is by
nature sceptical, apt at reasoning ; circumstances
cause him to travel extensively, to see many lands
and many peoples ; he has no family influence to
counteract the ever-growing spirit of independence
and self-reliance which emancipates him from all re-
ligious trammels, which prepares him to receive every
new idea, every new influence, with sympathy. The
conscience of the first man will be deeply tinged with
that religious and somewhat austere influence which
is derived from his family life, and from university
influences, which can be great. The conscience of the
second man will reflect the emancipating influence
exercised by travelling, by much intercourse with
foreign peoples and ideals ; for the education of travel
is as powerful in the influence it exerts as the educa-
tion of a university. Here are two men totally
different in character ; this difference will be mani-
fested in the manner in which they appreciate events ;
the '' conscience '' of each will be different.

And then the question arises : why do you con-
sider such and such an act to be right, such other one
to be wrong ? Because my conscience tells me it is
right or wrong, you say. But why is your conscience
thus called in as arbitrator ? What claim has it to
infallibility ? Your conscience is a part of yourself.

THE MORAL LAW 103

It has been formed by all sorts of accumulations of
influences, hereditary and mesological. How can a
part of yourself be infallible ? How can that part of
a whole which is immoral be moral ? And by what
standard do you judge of the righteousness of your
judgments, of the judgments of your conscience ?
Obviously, you judge and you appreciate according
to your mental habits, and your mental habits are
simply the result of heredity and education. And
WHY do you obey your conscience ? Answer that
question, my friend. Is your obedience real or
feigned ? Do you listen to the voice of conscience
as a hypocrite, who needs to cloak his vices with the
mantle of virtue ? Do you listen as a coward,
afraid to probe your conscience to the bottom ? Do
you listen mechanically, because you are too indolent
to examine your conscience ? Do you listen and
obey as a soldier listens to and obeys his officer,
automatically, without reflecting ? For there are
many ways of listening to the voice of conscience.
But there is another question : every judgment
which you make, which you say your conscience
makes, is it disinterested, or is it selfish, egotistical ?
'* You embrace your neighbour and have soft words
for him. But I say unto you : your love of your
neighbour is but. your love of yourself, falsified."
Already La Rochefoucauld had expressed the same
idea, and had called attention to the interested and
egotistical character of all our acts. But whereas
La Rochefoucauld merely denied the reality of
altruism, but maintained the theory of the supreme
value of altruism, Nietzsche denies, not merely the
reality of altruistic sentiments, but the value of them.
Egoism is the best, and the greatest, and the only real
thing in life. Everything else is phantasm, and

104 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

perhaps error ; but egoism, the love of Hfe, and the
affirmation of one's Hfe and of oneself, is real and
tangible. And it is a natural sentiment, perhaps the
only natural one. What is unnatural, what is unreal,
what is very distinctly ugly, is the masquerading of
egoism under the mantle of altruism, disinterested-
ness, and other specious and sonorous words. Every
act which we commit is inspired by egoism. And
how could it be otherwise ? An act which is not
inspired by the desire to preserve our own life — that is
to say, to affirm our own life — must be an act inspired
by the contrary desire — namely, the desire to destroy
life. But the characteristic of modern pessimism is
precisely a fear of its own logical consequences. The
pessimist, who regards life as an evil, takes refuge in
scepticism. '* When to-day a philosopher gives it to
be understood that he is no sceptic . . . the world
hears the announcement with regret ; one examines
him curiously, not without shyness, one would like to
ask so many questions . . . yes, there is no doubt
about it, among his frightened hearers, whose number
is legion, he passes henceforth for a dangerous man.
It seems to them as if they heard a distant, terrifying
noise, as if some new explosive were being tried, some
mental dynamite, perhaps some newly discovered
Russian nihilin, by this pessimist bonce voluntatis,
who not only says No, and desires the Non-Being, but
also — horrible thought ! — puts his negative theories
into practice." * There seems no doubt about it ;
theoretically pessimism may flourish, as it indeed does
to-day ; but, practically, its consequences are avoided
— that is to say, suicide is avoided. Which does not
mean that other consequences, scepticism, the denial
of will-power, the disgust of life, do not follow ; and

^ " Werke/' vii. 152.

THE MORAL LAW 105

these consequences are as bad as, perhaps worse in
their ultimate consequences than, general suicide.

However, pursuing our examination, we find that
the greatest disgust of life, every form of asceticism
and mortification, nay, suicide itself, are but expres-
sions of the sentiment of egoism. Schopenhauer's
theory of suicide, as being in reality the strongest
affirmation of the desire of life, is well known. But all
those conditions of life preconised by Schopenhauer
as means to abolishing in us that desire of life,
mortifications of the flesh, asceticism, sequestration,
self-torture, slow and gradual voluntary suicide — are
these conditions of life really expressions of the nega-
tion of the desire of life ? No ; he who mortifies his
body, subjects it to every privation and torture, is
perhaps the most egotistical of us all. For he is ready
to sacrifice all those conditions which are commonly
regarded as rendering life tolerable, in order to satisfy
his desire of life, his desire for affirming life, his desire
for pleasure. The ascetic enjoys life after his fashion ;
and his asceticism merely proves that his conception
of an enjoyable life differs from the ordinary con-
ception, that he himself is an abnormal creation,
probably a pathological one. The same argument
which Schopenhauer has rightly employed against
the theory of suicide as an act inspired by hostility
to life, may equally be applied to the ascetic ideal.

We are egotistical in our love — we are most
thoroughly egotistical in our love for others, which is
egoism strengthened and fortified. We love others
as a means of conquering them, as a means of seducing
them ; our love is but an expression of our Will of
Power and of domination.

But if there is nothing but egoism, and if altruism
is but a term devoid of any reality, what becomes of

106 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

the reality of the moral law, whose foundation is
altruism ? The utilitarian school have maintained
that the interest of all and the interest of each
coincide in the long run. But, in the first place,
this is reducing the categorical imperative to a mere
calculation of profit and loss. And, in the second
place, the utilitarian theory is demonstrably wrong
in fact. Individual interests are not invariably
identical with the interests of society. The interests
of the masters are not only not identical, but are
very greatly opposed, to the interests of the populace.

Thus the whole of the categorical imperative of
the conscience reduces itself upon examination to the
mental habits acquired partly from heredity, partly
from education. And this imperative of the con-
science, by what is it controllable ? By the con-
science ? Here we are at a deadlock. And yet
the reply must be affirmative. The conscience,
accumulation of mental habits derived from different
sources, controls itself. For the '' conscience of
humanity '' is a phantom. The '' conscience of
humanity " is a term embracing all the different
consciences of the myriads of individuals which
compose humanity, each of them differing, in a
degree more or less great, from the others.

The truth seems to be this : the instincts of every
man — that is to say, that which is fundamental in
our nature — incite us to affirm life in every circum-
stance, incite us to realise life in all its plenitude,
to live wholly. The so-called moral law is an
accumulation of mental prejudices, due to various
historical conditions, which have caused the stronger
races, those who could afford to live according to
their instincts and to give full vent to their passions,
to be vanquished by the weaker races, triumph the

THE MORAL LAW 107

concrete symbol of which is the Christian reHgion,
the reUgion of sympathy and pity. These weaker
races, weaker physically and mentally, had never-
theless more cunning, more patience, more rusS
than their adversaries. Their weapon was the
moral law, first under the form of a revelation from
God, subsequently under the form of the categorical
imperative. The moral law is merely the expression
of the ideals of this weaker race — that is to say, of
their character, which is at once treacherous and
lying and revengeful and cowardly and miserably
weak. The victory of Christianity has done more for
the establishment of the moral law than any other
event in the history of the world. The moral law has
laid hold of humanity. And yet when we come to
examine this law, this moral imperative, what do we
find ? An accumulation of mental habits, derived
partly from heredity, partly from education, partly
from experience, controllable by nothing except
itself, whose claim to infallibility and immutability
is absurd, but which tyrannises us, although it is
but our own creation, the fruit of a somewhat
morbid imagination.

Another point to be noticed in connection with
the moral law is its extreme anti-natural, anti-vital
tendency. Morality is the greatest enemy of life
and of all that is fundamental in life. In the name
of morality we are called upon to crush out or at
any rate to fight bitterly against our instincts,
against that which lies at the very root of life,
against that which conditions life. This in itself,
and if it were alone, would suffice to condemn
morality. The aim of life, the only possible aim of
life, is the affirmation of itself, because the object
of life, as far as we know the only object, is to live,

108 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

and to manifest itself, and to realise all its possi-
bilities. The strong man, the real man, he who
loves life and is not afraid of it, loves all that life
contains, its risks and adventures, its tears and
sufferings, its disappointments and disillusions, as
much as its joys and victories. And the great
passions, all of them are but signs of exuberant and
healthy vitality, of a vitality which seeks to break
down the barriers imposed on it by artificial means,
such as the moral law, and which seeks the only life
worth living, the integral life. For the great man
all the passions are equally legitimate, equally
necessary to the affirmation of life ; hate as much
as love, revenge as much as sympathy, lust as much
as chastity, anger as much as goodness ; and hate,
revenge, lust, anger, brutality, hardness of heart,
are the virile passions, the only passions worthy of
the great man and of the strong man, who knows
how to give vent to them, and who is sufficiently his
own master to know how and when to control them.
*' The mastery over one's passions, not their destruc-
tion or weakening ! The greater the force of the
will, the greater the amount of liberty which can
be granted to the passions of the soul. The great
man is great on account of the freedom with which
he gives vent to his passions, and through the still
greater power which he manifests in keeping these
wild animals in check and placing them at his
service." ^ But the weaker race, the masses, with
their instinctive hatred of the strong and the mighty,
at the hands of whom they have had so often to
suffer, have condemned in the moral law all these
virile passions as ''immoral.*' They have invented
the '' good man," he who is also the weak man and

' " Werke," xv. 480.

THE MORAL LAW 109

the inferior type of humanity, and who is too weak,
too degenerate to know the supreme beauty and joy
of giving vent to the most intense passions that surge
within the human breast in complete hberty, the
joy of giving vent to those virile passions as a luxury,
of employing them as a means of affirming and of
satisfying life ; only he who is powerful enough to
possess great passions and yet be so complete a
master of them as to be able to control them, who
can give them all liberty, so as to taste thus the full
joy of life, and yet withhold them when they menace
his safety ; only he can know the value of the
passions.

" For every strong man who has remained true
to nature, love and hate, gratitude and revenge,
kindness and anger, yes and no, are but one. One
is good on condition that one can also be bad ;
one is bad because one could not otherwise be
good. Whence came that plague and that anti-
natural ideology which abolished this dualism ? —
which held out onesidedness as the ideal ? Whence
this hemiplegic condition of virtue, this discovery
of the ' good man '? ... It is required that man
should cut himself off from every instinct, by reason
of which he can be converted into an enemy, or on
account of which he can inflict damage, or can be
angry, or can plan revenge ? . . . This anti-natural
conception corresponds with that dualistic idea of
a wholly good and a wholly bad Being (God, Spirit,
Man), the first of which sums up all positive, the
latter all negative, forces, intentions and conditions.
. . . This conception does not therefore even deem
it necessary that every contradiction between good
and bad shall condition reciprocally its antithesis.
On the contrary, the bad must disappear and the

110 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

good alone remain, the one has a right to existence,
the other should not exist at all." ^

This conception is anti-natural and false. One-
sideness is contrary to nature. Our passions, being
part of our nature, are intended to be manifested,
subject to the ultimate control of the Will. There
is no question of morality here ; the maintenance
of life, the consolidation and affirmation of life,
which is the only object of life so far as we know,
demands that free play shall be given to the passions,
certainly ; but it also demands that the passions shall
be in the service of man, and not man in the service oj
his passions. He alone has a right to give free play
to his passions, to the great and dangerous passions
of hate and revenge and lust of conquest, who is also
the master of his passions, to whom the passions are
as a luxury, and a luxury necessary to the full realisa-
tion of life, but which must be kept in hand, like
unto the pack of hounds obedient to the call of the
huntsman. To be the slave of one's passions — like
the criminal of the slums — ^is a sign of degeneracy
and weakness. But the moral law condemns all the
virile passions, because those who invented it were
not strong enough to know the value of these pas-
sions, because the}^ could not give vent to them
without at once allowing themselves to be dominated
by them ; and thus the virile passions represented
to them, to these weaklings, an element destructive
of life. Not with impunity can one give free play
to one's passions ; one must be worthy of this
luxury, and rich enough to afford it, rich enough in
strength and in Will-Power. And then the stronger
races have invariably utilised the weaker ones as a
field of experiments for the play of their passions.

^ " Werke," xv. 219, 220.

THE MORAL LAW 111

Thus have the weaker races, the inventors of the
moral law, suffered doubly from the passions,
suffered through themselves and suffered through
others, and it is but natural on their part that the
passions should be condemned by them.

But it does not ensue that this condemnation of
the passions is not profoundly anti-natural. The
passions are a sign of healthy and exuberant vitalit}^ ;
like most things, they must not be used abusively ;
their use has its limits, a limit well defined, and the
penalty of overstepping which is decay and death.
But the strong man knows his strength ; he knows
the limit of his strength ; and he can afford to give
vent to his passions, he must give vent to them, not
only as a safety-valve, but a means of enriching life
and completing life. The man who knows no pas-
sions is a weak man, a hemiplegic, miserable creature.
It is not the brigand or the '* man of prey '* that is
a pathological manifestation, but the ''good man,''
he who lives shut up in his narrow corner, knowing
nothing of those almost boundless expanses of life
which only the bold and the brave can explore.
The passions are the expression of our '' primitive
self,'' a remnant of the '' brute," but beautiful in
the revelation which they afford of the strength of
life, of the manifold wealth of life.

Morality is a partial paralysis of life. For, as a
matter of fact, it does paralyse the energies of the
man who listens to its commands. It orders him to
sacrifice himself for others — that is to say, it orders
him to suppress the chief, the only, incitement to
action, which is the prospect of enriching and
beautifying his own life. It orders him to consecrate
all his activity, all his energy, all his capacity, not
to the embellishment of his own existence or to the

112 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

development of his own creative power, but for the
benefit of others, of others who will neither benefit
by his activity nor be grateful for it. Thus does
morality not only paralyse Hfe, it renders it ugly,
it destroys whatever beauty may be in it.

It destroys its beauty by substituting for a mani-
fold and exuberant variety a dull and sickening
uniformity ; or at least by trying to substitute such
a uniformity, for it seems as if the attainment of
this odious ideal were at least difficult. '' Let us
consider the utter unintelligence of such a statement
as : ' Thus and thus ought man to be.' Reality
shows us a beautiful richness of types, an extrava-
gant exuberance of forms and changes ; and some
wretched stick-in-the-corner moralist comes up and
says : ' No ! Man ought to be otherwise.' He even
knows, this church mouse, how and what man ought
to be — he paints his image of man on the wall and
cries, ' Ecce Homo.' But even when the moralist
turns to the solitary individual and says to him :
' Thus and thus shouldest thou be,' he does not
cease making himself ridiculous. The individual
is a piece of Fate, something which belongs to the
past and to the future, a law and a necessity for
everything which is and which will be. To say
to him ' Change thyself ' is equivalent to desiring
the world to change itself, indeed to move back-
wards." ^

The moral law is thus another of the great obstacles
to the realisation of Nietzsche's ideal. The mere
fact of causing man to subordinate his personality to
an external power, is in itself a hindrance to the
integral life. And if it be replied that man's con-
science is not external to him, it may be replied that

* ''Werke," viii. 89, 90.

THE MORAL LAW 113

it is not, indeed, external to him in reality, but that
it is an accumulation of prejudices, habits and
experiences, derived either from heredity or from
the surrounding environment ; only the categorical
imperative supposes the conscience as commanding
to man in the name of — what ? In the name
of Reason, reply moralists since Kant. But this
Reason, what sort of abstract entity is it ? If we
look further, we find that all the categorical impera-
tives which command man to obey the summons of
his conscience in the name of some higher power,
merely command him to obey the summons of his
prejudices, habits and experiences, in the name of — ?
In the name of those same mental habits.

H

CHAPTER V

THE RELIGIONS

We have said already that Nietzsche's is a deeply
religious character. Taking the word religion in the
sense of being the cult of an ideal, few thinkers have
been so idealistic, so passionately idealistic, as the
creator of Zarathustra. But to say of Nietzsche that
his was a religious nature, in the sense of belonging to
any particular creed, would be absurd. If there has
never been a greater idealist than Friedrich Nietzsche,
there has never been a greater atheist. Zarathustra
is the destroyer of God, he teaches perpetually that
" God is dead.'' But the idea of an anthropomorphic
God in itself may have been indifferent to Nietzsche.
Himself a convinced atheist, he nevertheless never re-
garded religious belief with hostility. The sectarian
animosity and ferocious narrowmindedness of a French
Radical and Freemason was, of course, a thing un-
known to a spirit like Nietzsche's. But what Nietz-
sche hates in the idea of God, what he attacks most
bitterly in that idea, is the '' moral God," the God of
Christianity, the God of the poor and humble, the
God of love and forgiveness and sympathy. It is
against the Christian conception of God, not against
the conception of God in itself, that his attacks are
directed. His attacks against God are directed
against those who have created the Christian God,
against the " slaves," against the Jews, against the
rabble, whose ideal is the ideal of Christianity, whose

114

THE RELIGIONS 115

character is reflected in the God of their creation.
Nietzsche has no objection to the conception of God
in itself, provided that God be represented as the Will
of Power — that is to say, provided he be a God created
by a strong race and reflecting the character of that
race, their might and courage and insouciance and
lust of conquest. Such a God was Jahweh, the
old God of Israel, the mysterious and jealous God,
echoes of whose might reach us in the Old Testament.
'' A race which believes in itself still has its own
god. It honours in the God those conditions thanks
to which it has been successful — it symbolises its own
desires, its own consciousness of power, in a Being to
whom it can be thankful for that consciousness. He
who is rich, gives ; a proud people need a god to
whom they can sacrifice. Religion under such con-
ditions is a form of gratitude. One is thankful for
oneself, for one's power ; therefore one needs a god.
Such a god must be both useful and harmful, he must
be able to be at once friend and foe, one admires in
him things good and bad. That anti-natural castra-
tion of a god which reduces him to a god of the just
only, would in this case be quite unwished for. One
needs the bad god as well as the good one, for it is
not precisely to tolerance of humanitarianism that
one owes one's own existence. What would be the
use of a god to whom anger, revenge, envy, sarcasm,
cunning, violence, were unknown ? To whom even
the glorious ardeurs of the hour of triumph and
destruction were perhaps unknown ? One would not
understand such a deity ; why should one have him ?
But when a race decays, when it feels its belief in the
future, its hope of liberty, finally vanishing ; when
submission appears to it as the most useful policy,
and the virtues of the slave present themselves to the

116 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

conscience of its members as a condition of existence ;
then must also the idea of the god change. The god
becomes nervous, fearful, humble, recommends the
' peace of mind,' preaches against hatred, recom-
mends cautiousness and ' love,' both of friend and
foe ; he is perpetually moralising, he becomes every-
body's god, becomes a private gentleman, becomes
cosmopolitan. Formerly he represented a people,
the force of a great people, all that is aggressive and
thirsting after power in the soul of a great people ;
now he is merely the ' good ' god. As a matter of fact
there is no other alternative for gods : either they
symbohse the Will of Power — and in this case they
are national or racial gods ; or else they symbolise
the impotency to attain power — and in this case they
are necessarily good." ^

A god symbolising the Will of Power was Jahweh,
the old God of Israel. '' The history of Israel is
invaluable as a typical history of the denaturalisation
of natural values ; I can cite five examples of this.
Originally, especially in the time of the Kings,
Israel stood in a natural — that is, in a right — relation
to all things. Its Jahweh was the expression of the
consciousness of power, of self-satisfaction, of belief
in self ; one expected from Jahweh victory and
salvation, one expected from him that nature should
bring forth what was necessary to the people —
especially rain. Jahweh is the God of Israel and
consequently the God of Justice and Right : this is
the logic of every race which is great and powerful,
and which has good conscience of its power." ^ But
as time went on came the Assyrian conquest and the
Babylonian captivity, and the belief in themselves,

^ " Werke/' viii. 232, 233.
^ Ihid. 244, 245.

THE RELIGIONS 117

the hope of the future, the hope of, and confidence in,
victory, gradually disappeared and gave place to a
feeling of despair, of resignation, of submission. It
was during the Babylonian captivity that the greatest
transformation seems to have taken place. Exiled
from their land, prisoners among a strange and
'' heathen " race, the people of Israel's spirit was
broken, the old aggressive spirit, long undermined,
was finally vanquished, and '' resignation " and
*' submission to Fate '' took its place. This change
in the character of the people was, of course, reflected
in the change undergone by their conception of the
deity. Jahweh, the '' jealous God,'' the god of
victory and conquest, was gradually replaced by
another god, more cosmopolitan, more humane, by a
god of pity and love, the god suited to the character
of a subject-race, and the exact opposite to the god
of the conquering race. Out of this god, growing
ever more humane, ever more moral — that is to say,
ever weaker — was evolved the Christian conception of
God, the ideal deity of the rabble, of all that which
is weak and miserable and unhappy and unsuccessful,
and who lust after the power they are impotent to
attain except by ruse and cunning.

But the Christian God, poor as is his conception,
has gradually been succeeded by a yet poorer and
more vaporous sort of God.

'' When the conditions of exalted life, when every-
thing strong, brave, domineering, proud has been
eliminated from the idea of God, when he sinks step
by step to a mere symbol of weariness, to a sheet-
anchor for the drowning, when he becomes the god
of the poor, of sinners and of invalids par excel-
lence, and when the predicate " Messiah," '' Re-
deemer," becomes a predicate of the divinity in

118 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

general : what story does such a transformation,
such a reduction of the idea of God, recount ? The
' Kingdom of God ' has certainly been enlarged. . . .
But the god of the ' greater number,' the democrat
among the gods, was nevertheless anything but a
proud heathen deity. He remained a Jew, he re-
mained the god of the back parlour, of all the dark
corners and hiding-places of the unhealthy quarters
of the globe. His world-empire remained an under-
ground empire, a hospital, a ghetto-empire. And
God himself, so pale, so feeble, so degenerate ! Even
the palest among pale persons, the metaphysicians
themselves, succeeded in getting hold of him. And,
like spiders, they spun around him so long, until at
last, hypnotised by their movements, he became
himself a spider and a metaphysician. Now we see
him projecting the world out of himself * sub specie
Spinozae ' — and now we watch him as he gradually
transfigures himself into something ever thinner and
paler ; he becomes an ' Ideal,' a ' pure Spirit,' an
' Absolute ' a ' thing in itself ! ' . . . The fall of a
God : God becomes the ' thing in itself ! ' * . . ."

Thus when Nietzsche attacks the idea of God, it is
in reality the idea of the moral law which he attacks.
He attacks that ideal, which he represents to be the
ideal of the slaves, of the toilers, of the masses, of the
rabble, of those who are impotent to attain power and
yet lust after power. Unable to subdue or subjugate
the strong races, the masters, by physical force and
in open combat, they adopt all sorts of tortuous
means, cunning, ruse, patience, hypocrisy, in order
to vanquish those strong races and to conquer power
for themselves. The most gigantic piece of " tar-
tuff erie," of cunning and ruse, ever adopted for
' " Werke," viii. 234, 235.

THE RELIGIONS 119

the subjugation and castration of the strong man, is
the Christian rehgion. The triumph of this reHgion
marks the triumph of the slaves. They have
triumphed through having made their ideals — ideals
of revenge and hatred and envy, sharpened by their
consciousness of impotency — the ideals of universal
and necessary good. They have trans valuated all the
natural values. For the strong man, good is synony-
mous with strong, with beautiful, with powerful and
mighty. For the weak man, the slave, who has to
bear the weight of the might, exercised without com-
punction, of the strong man, good is, on the contrary,
synonymous with weakness, with impotency, with
ugliness and poverty. '' Blessed are the meek, '
blessed are the merciful, blessed are the ' pure in
heart.' " The ideal of the slaves, the ideal of weak-
ness and impotency and ugliness, is raised by Chris-
tianity into an universal law. The slaves need mercy,
because they are afraid of their masters, because they
are cowardly ; they exalt humility, because obsequi-
ousness is part of the character of the slave ; they
exalt the '' purity of heart,'' they talk about the
" advent of the Kingdom of God," in order to cloak
their own envy, hatred and malice against all that
which they are not, which they cannot possess, beauty,
strength, mental and material wealth. With the
triumph of Christianity, triumph due to the degener-
acy of the stronger races brought on by their own
fault and by their neglect of biological law, the values
of the slaves (good=weak=humble=merciful=
sickly and poor) triumphed also, and became
*' universal laws," prevailing at all times and in all
places. Never was greater effrontery shown.

During nineteen centuries Christianity has retarded
the progress of civilisation and obstructed the onward

120 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

march of humanity. But Christianity is itself but a
successor of the old Jewish religion, it is itself essen-
tially Jewish, the creation of Jews, reflecting all the
prejudices and mental habits of the Jews. " The
Jews are the most remarkable people in the history
of the world, because, having been confronted by the
question of Being and Not Being, they have, with
quite uncanny self-consciousness, preferred Being
at any price ; this price was the radical falsifxation
of nature, of everything natural, of all reality, both
of the inner and of the outer world. They shut them-
selves out from all those conditions under which a
people can live, and under which a people may live,
they created, out of their own imagination, a concep-
tion of the world opposed to all natural conditions ;
one after the other they have inverted religion,
ritual, morality, history, psychology, in the most
pernicious way, and have set them in opposition
to their natural value. . . . The Jews are on this
account the most epoch-making people in the history
of the world ; through their influence they have
falsified humanity to such a degree that the Christian
can feel himself an anti-Semite without even having
conscience of himself as the final consequence of
Judaism.'' ^

The victory of Christianity has been the most
pernicious event in the history of the world, because
it has signified the elimination of one standard of
morals and the complete monopoly of another and
baser set. The genealogy of morals is to be explained
on anthropological grounds. There are, or were
originally, two systems of morals in contradiction with
each other. The one is the system of the masters.
The race of the masters, the superior race, the race

^ " Werke," viii. 243.

THE RELIGIONS 121

which Gobineau and Nietzsche, together with the
modern school of anthroposociology, identify with
the Aryan race, homo europceus, whose physical
and mental superiority is accompanied by parallel
anthropological features which appear to denote a
report of causality between the two — this race has its
system of morals which is exclusively its own. For
this race of strong and brave men, for this race of
conquerors, good is identical with strong, with brave,
with aristocracy, of sentiment and taste, with the
lust of conquest and revenge, with everything which
affirms life and by which life manifests itself. On the
other hand, this race of conquerors will consider as
bad everything by which life is weakened or dimin-
ished, will consider bad as identical with weak, with
cowardly, with lack of refinement in taste and senti-
ment ; for it the cardinal virtue will be hardness of
heart, and the cardinal vice sympathy. And this
standpoint is natural when we consider that the
characteristics of the race are intrepidity and
insouciance in the face of danger and death, love
of adventure and conquest ; that its members are
accustomed to inflict hardship and suffering on them-
selves, and therefore consider it right to inflict hard-
ship and suffering on others. Again, the standpoint
of the weaker race, of the race of slaves, is natural,
when we consider that its chief characteristic is
impotency, and that it is perpetually suffering from
the inroads of the '' barbarians,'' as it terms the
superior race. Conscious of its impotency, of its
smallness and of its ugliness, the weaker race still
thirsts after power. Especially does it thirst after
revenge for all that it has suffered at the hands of
its enemies. But how attain to that power, unless
by tortuous and subterraneous means ? The weaker

122 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

race are gifted with greater cunning, greater ruse,
and above all greater patience, than the race of con-
querors, accustomed to fight in the open and to deal
swift and crushing blows. Thirsting after power,
the slaves utilise those qualities which they possess,
cunning, ruse, patience ; and the Christian religion
is a result, and a tremendous result, of the exercise
of these qualities. In the Christian religion every-
thing is denaturalised. Good is rendered synony-
mous with weak, with sickly, with poor, with ugly ;
the '' peace of mind," and forgiveness even of one's
enemies, are preached ; and so well have the masses
done their work that this table of values, the slaves'
table of values, has completely ousted the other table
of values, that of the conquerors and masters who
know neither forgiveness nor peace of mind. The
slaves' table of values has been erected into a
universal and immutable law.

The Christian religion was the work of the rabble,
of the lowest classes of the populace. Its triumph
was the triumph of a base instinct, thirsting for
power and yet conscious of its impotency, and
employing every subterranean means to attain its
end. First among these means is hypocrisy, and
of the most ignoble sort. This talk about the
" elect," about " sanctity," about '' the Kingdom
of God," about *' love " and " forgiveness," is the
basest of hypocrisies, designed to cloak all the envy,
hatred and malice of a weak and impotent race,
conscious of its impotency and of its repulsiveness.
In a brilliant page, Nietzsche has described the
process of " manufacturing the Christian ideal."

'' * Would someone like to descend into the mysteri-
ous catacombs where one can witness the manu-
facture of an ideal ? Who has the requisite courage ?

THE RELIGIONS 123

Come along ; from here the eye can penetrate into
this dark workshop. Wait a minute, my bold
friend ; yom eye must accustom itself to this
artificial and doubtful daylight. . . . Now ! it is
all right ! Speak up ! What is going on down
underneath there ? Tell me what you see, O my
dangerously inquisitive friend. It is I who am
now listening to you.'

*' — ' I see nothing, but I hear all the better. I hear
murmurs and whispers which proceed, mysterious,
hushed, discreet from all corners. It seems to me
that they are lying ; a honey-like sweetness en-
velops every sound. It appears that weakness is
to be changed into a merit by a sort of conjuring
trick — there is no doubt about it, it is quite as you
said/

"—' And then ! '

" — * And impotency which is too feeble to do any-
thing is to be changed into " goodness,'' ignoble
cowardice into ''humility," submission to those one
hates becomes '' obedience " (this obedience is due
to someone who requires that submission, they say,
and who is called God). The feebleness of the weak,
the cowardice with which they are filled, the docility
which remains at the door and waits patiently, all
this is baptised by a new name : '' patience " — which
passes doubtless also for a virtue. The sentence, ''I
cannot avenge myself" becomes *' I will not avenge
myself," or even " I forgive them " (for they know
not what they do — but we, we know what they do).
. . . Then they talk about ''loving their enemies"
— and they sweat over it. . . .'

"— ' And then ! '

" — ' They are miserable, there is no doubt about it,
all these false coiners, although they keep each other

124 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

warm — but they say that their misery is a proof
that God distinguishes and chooses them ; does one
not thrash the curs one Ukes best ? And perhaps
this misery is but a preparation, a time of trial, a
lesson — perhaps it is something still better ; some-
thing which some day will be indemnified at a
heavy rate of interest — not in gold, no, but in
happiness. They call this " felicity/' '

''—' Go on ! '

'' — ' Now they give me to understand that not only
are they better than the powerful and the masters
of the world, whose spittings they have to lick (not
out of fear, oh dear, no, not at all out of fear, but
because God commands obedience to all authority)
— but they are also richer than these, or at least
they will be richer some day. Enough ! Enough !
I cannot stand it any longer. Fresh air, fresh air !
This workshop where one manufactures an ideal — it
seems to me as if it reeks of lying and deceit.'

" — ' No, one moment more ! You have told us
nothing of the masterpiece of these necromancers,
who know how to change black into white and
innocence : Have you not noticed that which is
their highest achievement, their most audacious,
insane, artificial master-stroke ? Take care ! These
worms, swollen with envy and hatred — what have
they done with envy and hatred ? Have you heard
these words proceed from their mouth ? Would
you imagine, if you only listened to their discourses,
that you are among men full of malignity ? '

'' — ' I understand. I open my ears again (alas !
and hold my nose). Now I begin to understand the
meaning of what they are always saying : '' We,
the good, we are also the just " ; what they claim
is not their revenge, but the ''triumph of justice " ;

THE RELIGIONS 125

what they loathe is not their enemy, oh no ! They
loathe iniquity, impiety \ the faith which inspires
them is not the hope of revenge, the intoxication of
vengeance (''sweeter than honey," used already
Homer to call it), but the triumph of God, of the
just God over the impious, and those whom they love
in this world are not their brothers in hatred but
their *' brothers in love," or, as they say, all the
Good and the Just on earth/

'' — ' And what do they call that fiction which con-
soles them for all their earthly sufferings — what do
they call their phantasmagory of a future state of
felicity, the advantages of which they discount in
advance ? '

"— What ? Do I hear well ? They caU it :
'' the last judgment " ; and the advent of their
kingdom they call the advent of the '' kingdom of
God," — in the meantime, they hve '' in faith," '' in
love," " in hope." . . /

'' ' Enough ! Enough ! ' " ^

Every natural conception falsified ; the moral
values, good=strong=powerful==mighty=beautiful^.^^^
inverted and turned into their diametrical opposite ;
such is the result of Christianity. The slaves, the
weaker race, conscious of their impotency and yet
moved by that Will of Power which is the elementary
condition of all life, desire to gain the upper hand.
What other means, and what better means, than
that of inverting all the moral values, of turning
good into synonymous with weak and oppressed
and ugly and cowardly ? But, in order to effect
this transvaluation of all values, it was necessary that
the assistance of the supernatural world should be
called in. For, in order to vanquish the strong race,

^ " Werke," vii. 329-331.

126 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

strong means must be employed ; and as the slaves
possess neither courage nor physical strength nor
talent for organisation, they must employ ruse,
cunning, and hypocrisy. In order to vanquish the
strong race, it was necessary to render that race ill.
Christianity has succeeded — there is no doubt about
it — in this task. In order to obtain its victory, an
enormous dose of hypocrisy was necessary. The
whole invention of the supernatural world was
hypocrisy. In order to render the qualities which
distinguish the weaker race attractive, it was neces-
sary to identify the suffering and the poor and the
miserable with the " elect of God.'' God himself,
synonymous with the Will of Power in all its
pride with the masters, became synonymous with
the consciousness of impotency in the hands of the
slaves. The lust of power became, in the mouth of
these hypocrites, '' the striving after the Kingdom
of God.*' Revenge, hatred, envy, malice became
transformed into '* love,'' even of enemies, into
" hatred of the evil and impious." Cowardice be-
came '' patience," and low obsequiousness became
" humility," and was elevated to the rank of a
virtue ordained b}^ God. The whole of this Christian
atmosphere of lust, accompanied by consciousness of
impotency and enveloped in a soft cloak of hypocrisy,
is reflected in the New Testament, alike in its
doctrines — " blessed are the meek," " blessed are
the pure in heart," '' blessed are the merciful,"
*' whosoever shall wish to enter the Kingdom of God,
it is necessary for him that he should become as
a little child " — and in the story of the Passion, with
the lesson it conveys of swallowing every insult,
every blow, every indignity, with " forbearance "
— another name for cowardice — and ending with

I

THE RELIGIONS 127

that typical prayer : '' Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do/'

The founders of Christianity had shown proof of
great skill. The cross with its bleeding victim was
an admirable instrument for appealing to the '' for-
giveness '' and " charity '' of men — that is to say, for
destroying all that which is hard and virile in human
nature. Christianity was also favoured, and greatly
favoured, by circumstances. The great Roman
empire, type of all that which is strongest and greatest
in man, was already torn by internal strife and
dismembered by foreign invaders. The " barbarians ''
who invaded Europe, the '' barbarians '' from the
steppes and from [the plains and mountains of Asia
— Huns, Vandals, Mongols — were indeed beautiful
types of the primitive man, overflowing with force
and exuberant life, but alas ! not as the Greeks or
the Romans, who combined the strength and vigour
of the '' man of prey " with the intellectual strength
and vigour, so colossal as to be incomprehensible
for us, which was incarnated in an i^schylus, in a
Themistocles, in a Thuc3^dides, in a Julius Caesar,
in a Marius. Matched against all the subterranean
forces of ruse, cunning, hypocrisy, the beast of
prey incarnated in the '' blond German,'' superb in
his indomitable will, in his power of destruction, but
possessing no creative power, this beast of prey was
fatally doomed to be vanquished. Christianity
employed in this fight against the " barbarian '' the
best possible method. It rendered him ill. And
yet how was it possible to cause the " barbarian "
to be tormented by his conscience, how came the
cross and its palpitating victim to find favour with
these uncouth and savage races ? Probably this
astonishing phenomenon was due to weariness, and

128 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

due also, perhaps chiefly, to the absence of all
creative power in the '' barbarian,*' which robbed his
power of destruction of that which is destruction's
sweetest and noblest sanction, that of replacing what
is destroyed by something still higher, still more
beautiful. However, whatever the cause, the result
is incontestable. Christianity rendered the '' bar-
barian " sick. It gave him a conscience. It tamed
him, reduced him to docility, by the vision of the
cross.

It must be noted that Christianity admirably
adapted its methods to the character of those whom
it proposed to conquer. The cross, with its idea of
human sacrifice and of the redemption by blood, is
a heathen notion, borrowed without acknowledg-
ment from the cult of Adonis and Dionysus, from
an idea which anthropological research has shown
to be common to all parts of the world, to be pre-
valent among the Aztecs of Mexico as among the
Shilluks of the Soudan, among the cannibals of
Fiji as among the Samorins of Malabar. The sight
of the torn and bleeding victim would appeal to
the *' barbarians," even if they did not grasp the
significance of the legend of pardon attached to it.
As to the weapon which Christianity possesses in
'* conscience,'' its mechanism is at once simple and
supremely well adapted to its end. The '' bar-
barian," wild, uncouth, happy only in destruction,
great in destruction, must have an object which he
can destroy. How if, instead of destroying others,
he should be set to destroy himself ? The '' con-
science " is the best means to this end. Tormented
by his conscience, instructed to probe himself to
the bottom, haunted by the idea of sin and of dam-
nation, the '' barbarian " flagellates himself instead

THE RELIGIONS 129

of flagellating others. He is rendered ill, and the
remedy which is proposed to him is one designed to
aggravate that illness. He is rendered ill by the
phantom of his conscience, and he tortures himself
perpetually, he endures every suffering and mortifi-
cation, in order to appease that conscience, which
is the voice of the avenging God speaking to him
and requiring satisfaction. The idea of conscience
is what the French call '' une idee de maitre." The
weapon of conscience was the great weapon for
rendering the healthy man ill, for aggravating the
illness of those already unhealthy ; by the poison
of conscience was slowly, but surely, instilled into
the strong man and the happy man the notion of the
sinfulness of his strength and of his happiness.
*' Why should I be happy and strong and privileged,
while others are miserable and weak and suffering ? ''
whispers the insidious voice of conscience. As if
the strong man, and the great man, and he who is
blessed by an exuberant nature with abundance of
wealth, both physical and mental, has not the right,
has not the duty, to be happy and proud ; and,
contrariwise, has not the weakling, the invalid, the
wreck of life, the duty to suffer from these defects,
which render him an eyesore to the artist ?

The whole edifice of Christianity rests on an
imaginary conception of the world ; and this is a
condition necessary to its establishment and to its
preservation. '' In the Christian edifice, neither
morality nor religion come on one single point into
contact with reality. A mass of imaginary causes
CGod,' 'Soul,' 'Ego,' 'Spirit,' 'Free Will '—or
else the Will which is not free) ; a mass of imaginary
effects (' sin,' ' redemption,' ' grace,' ' punish-
ment,' ' forgiveness of sins '). Relations established

130 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

between imaginary beings (' God/ ' Spirits/
' Souls ') ; an imaginary natural science (anthropo-
centric ; entire ignorance of the concept of natural
causes) ; an imaginary psychology (a mass of mis-
understandings, interpretation of agreeable or dis-
agreeable feelings, e.g, that condition known as
' nervus sympathicus,' with the help of the symbolic
language of religious and moral idiosyncrasy,
' repentance,' ' remorse of conscience,' ' temptation
of the devil,' the ' presence of God ') ; an imaginary
teleology (' the Kingdom of God,' ' the last judg-
ment,' ' eternal life ')/' ^ Christianity, which set
itself the task of inverting nature, of inverting all
the natural tables of values, had to base itself
necessarily on an imaginary and anti-natural con-
ception of the world. For what is the natural, the
original, table of moral values ? As we have seen,
there are by nature two systems of morals, distinct
from each other, opposed to each other. The
masters, the ruling and strong race, have their
values, and in this table good is synonymous with
all those qualities which go to make up the character
of the race. Good is synonymous with strong,
with powerful, with brave, with violent — in a word,
with all that increases life's vitality ; and if immorality,
if unscrupulous and ferocious egoism, if cruelty and
suffering, increase the strength and vitality of life,
the masters say '' yes " to immorality ; for life is
that which '' must alwavs surmount itself," as
Zarathustra preaches, and the only law of life is
that which orders us to realise life in its plenitude,
in its integrity, and the only limit to the assertion
of life is the limit of our individual strength. To say
to man, as Christianity does, as the moral law does,

^ " Werke," viii. 231.

THE RELIGIONS 131

" become thus and thus, do this and this, do not do
the other thing,'' in the name of some abstract and
external entity, is an absurdity. Life, left to itself,
asserts itself within the limits of its strength and
leaves undone, not that which it ought to have
done, but that which the law of its own preservation
commands it imperiously to avoid.

The very essence of Christianity is humility ; and
this atmosphere of what he took to be subservience,
obsequiousness, lying, cowardice, is what caused the
great outburst of Nietzsche against Christianity
in his '' Antichrist.'' And, indeed, can we imagine
a Greek of the pre-Socratian era, a Pericles, an
iEschylus, a Themistocles, a Sophocles, reciting the
prayer of the Christian ''to be merciful unto us,
miserable sinners " ? Can we imagine an Over-Man,
such as Napoleon, such as Julius Caesar, such as
Cesare Borgia, thus humbjing himself in the dust ?
The code of the masters says : '* Be hard," " Ask
not for mercy and expect none " ; the code of the
Christian says: " Forgive," " Be merciful." Can we
imagine a proud man of the race of the masters
asking forgiveness ? He would not know what
forgiveness was. Can we imagine him asking for
mercy, asking for quarter — or giving quarter ?
Nietzsche was such a man. As Professor Lichten-
berger has remarked : '' Nietzsche was a classic
born in a democratic age." Nietzsche's whole
classical soul, his whole conception of life, the ideal
he has formed in " The Birth of Greek Tragedy "
of Greek life, of Greek philosophy, all contribute to
make him look upon Christianity as something
beneath him, as a religion for weak slaves who,
too cowardly and too impotent to gain power other-
wise, resorted to all the weapons of hypocrisy in

132 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

order to attain their ends. It was not the dogmas of
Christian theology which he assailed, so much as the
spirit of revenge and rancune which he supposed to
lie at the bottom of Christianity.

Another nihilistic religion is the great Asiatic
faith, that of the Buddha. But Nietzsche was
careful to distinguish between the Asiatic and the
European religion. Buddhism is essentially a
rehgion for races which are older, more advanced,
more aristocratic than the races of the West.
Buddhism is a nihilistic religion for aristocratic
races, Christianity a nihilistic religion for weak and
degenerate ones. Buddhism is a religion for aristo-
cratic races which have lost their strength, lost their
love of life, a result due in great measure to the climate.
It was, indeed, among the luxuriant tropical foliage
of Ceylon that Buddhism originated. Buddhism
represents, even in its nihilistic tendencies, the
diametrical opposite of the *' vulgar plebeianism *'
and impotent Will of Power which find their expres-
sion in Christianity. All the passions of hatred and
envy which Nietzsche saw in Christianity, find no
place in Buddhism. He attains in Asia the highest
wisdom, who is above, far above, all the passions,
good or bad, which agitate the human breast. The
sage is he who has recognised the essential vanity of
all things, who lives in communion with the Eternal,
to whom good and bad, envy and hatred, are all
alike unknown. The hygienic condition imposed
by Buddhism on all its adepts is peace, the perfect
peace which is undisturbed by any of those baser
passions which inferior humanity may know and
must know, but which the Brahmin disdains.
Brahminism, Buddhism, remain always the religions
of castes, essentially aristocratic, but the expression

THE RELIGIONS 133

of an aristocracy which is decayed, old, which is
touching its term. Peace and serenity are the
ke3niotes of Buddhism ; the mahgnity and envy
which know no peace are the dominant features of
that slaves' rebellion which is concretised in Chris-
tianity. The Buddhist will not torture himself
with his conscience ; he aspires to the nirvana of
absolute peace, where he is dead to the world around
him. Christianity was a religion which had to
conquer wild men and strong, and in order to con-
quer them it was first necessary to make them ill
with the idea of conscience. Buddhism needed no
such mechanism, as it had to deal with older races,
with races whose temperament was quite different,
moulded by a climate quite different.

The result of nineteen centuries of Christianity
has been to make man ill and timid and afraid of
himself as much as of others. With its ingenious
mechanism of conscience, with its doctrine of pacificism
and forgiveness, it has, on the one hand, made him
ill, on the other hand destroyed all that was most
virile in his nature. It has effectually sapped the
virility of the stronger races, of the masters, by
instilling into their mind the insidious mechanism
of conscience, which has caused them to doubt of
themselves. This is one of the master-strokes of
Christianity ; it has caused the stronger races to
cease to believe in themselves. Its other master-
stroke was the curbing of the passions of the masses
by the same mechanism. For, while the '* conscience ''
acted as a restraining power on the strong man,
preventing him from manifesting his strength and
from affirming his life as he would otherwise have
done, it also prevents the weaker races from breaking
wildly loose, as they do when this '* conscience *'

134 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

is temporarily removed, as in the French Jacquerie,
or in the Peasants* War at the time of the Reforma-
tion, or more recently during the Paris Commune ;
and this same conscience, preventing the instincts
of one and the other from manifesting themselves
externally, causes both to turn those instincts of
destruction against themselves ; they perpetually
torture themselves under the apprehension that it
is their conscience which reproaches them. Thus
Christianity, and its mechanism of conscience, is a
great life-destroyer, both negatively and positively.
But while, in one respect, its inhibitive influence
on the personality of its adherents be productive of
good, and be necessary to the stability of the social
structure ; on the other hand, that influence is in
the highest degree pernicious, in that it slays the
stronger races, those which are humanity's justifi-
cation and raison-d'etre. Nietzsche expressly
declares :

*' I have not declared war on the anaemic Christian
ideal with the purpose of destroying it, but in order
to put an end to its tyranny and to make room for
new and more robust ideals. The continued existence
of the Christian ideal is one of the things to be most
sincerely desired, because of those other ideals which
must exist side by side with it and perhaps vanquish
it.''^

The meaning of this is that Christianity is necessary
to the masses of humanity. It is the creation of
those masses, and it responds to their anaemic and
somewhat pitiable conception of life. For the masses
a faith is necessary, a faith in a law external to, and
higher than, humanity. Morality is necessary to
the construction and continued maintenance of the

' '• Werke," xv. 434.

THE RELIGIONS 135

social structure ; and the proof of this is that every
sociologist has sought the justification of a moral
law on sociological grounds. But what morality
can equal, in the power of its sanction, that of the
Christian faith, with nineteen centuries of tradition
behind it ? Nietzsche recognised that nineteen
centuries cannot be effaced in a day, and that indeed
their effacement is not necessary nor desirable.
Christianity is necessary, as Voltaire once put it,
*' in order to prevent our being assassinated by our
servants, if we have any/' It is a check, and a
salutary check, on the evil instincts of the mass.
But it is more. It is the great consoler of humanity.
It is not science, even with a capital, which can
pretend to have replaced religion as an explanation
of the riddles of life. Placed face to face with these
riddles of life and of death, the mass of humanity
will always seek some explanation of them. Only
the few, only the elite can afford to recognise
the supreme vanity of all things, can be able to
recognise that the only value of life, which is at the
same time its supreme value, is life considered as a
means for the creation of beauty, of ever greater
beauty. Christianity brings to the masses a sweet
illusion and a great consolation ; this alone renders
it necessary. It responds to a fundamental need
of humanity.

The continued existence of the Christian ideal is
desirable in the interests of the superior races them-
selves ; and firstly because that ideal, as incarnated
in the Catholic Church, represents the best means for
asserting their own domination. It teaches the
masses obedience, contentedness, meekness. And
secondly because, in order to establish a new ideal,
a more robust ideal, it is necessary that the ancient

136 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

one should still subsist, in order to engender its
successor. '' It seems to me always more and more/'
writes Nietzsche, " that the philosopher, as belonging
necessarily to to-morrow and the day after, has
always found himself in opposition with to-day, and
must always so find himself ; his enemy was always
the ideal of to-day. Up till now, all these extra-
ordinary benefactors of humanity whom we call
philosophers — and who seldom felt themselves to be
the friends of truth, and seemed rather to themselves
to be knaves and perilous points of interrogation —
all these, we say, found their task, their difficult,
unwished-for, unavoidable task, but also their
greatest and worthiest task, to be that of making
themselves the Cassandras of their day. It was
because they had the courage to vivisect boldly the
virtues of their day, that they succeed in revealing
what was their own greatest secret — the knowledge
of a new possibility for mankind, of a new and un-
trodden path to hidden greatness." ^

Christianity then, it may be said, is not an obstacle
to the realisation of Nietzsche's ideal, but rather the
contrary. This is an error. Certainly Christianity
acts beneficially on the masses, both as a check and
a consolation. As such, the effacement of nineteen
centuries of culture is neither necessary nor desirable.
But the monopoly of Christianity is an obstacle,
and a very great obstacle, perhaps the greatest
obstacle, to the realisation of Nietzsche's ideal.
If Christianity has done and can still do useful
work among the masses, it has proved the deadliest
poison for those who are above the masses, for those
superior men who are the salt of the earth and also
humanity's justification. It must ever be remem-

'"Werke."vii. 162.

THE RELIGIONS 137

bered that Christianity is an invention of the lowest
classes, that it represents the ideal of those classes,
that it alone benefits those classes. But its action
must be restrained to the sphere of those whose
ideal it is. The slaves, the oppressed, the weak, the
outcast, the mediocrities, can find satisfaction in
Christianity. It is not the duty of the masters to
deny them that satisfaction. But the masters have
their own ideal, and an ideal which is diametrically
and totally opposed to that of Christianity, and it is
that ideal which Christianity has always combatted,
and with success. The success of Christianity has
meant the impoverishment of humanity. Hence-
forth its influence must be exerted there alone
where that influence is legitimate. In other words,
Christianity must be an instrument in the hands of
a race of conquerors, of a strong and dominating
race, to be exploited by this race for its own benefit ;
and not, as it has been up till now, an instrument in
the hands of an inferior race, to be used against the
masters. If the interests of a certain class — the
least interesting — of humanity demand the main-
tenance of the Christian ideal, the interests of all
that is of value and of beauty in mankind demand
imperiously that new ideals shall be opened out
beside it and far above it.

I

CHAPTER VI

SCIENCE

Christianity especially, and religion in general, is the
greatest obstacle to the estabhshment of Nietzsche's
ideal. The religious idea in general implies the sub-
jection of man to a power which is foreign to his
nature, to a law which is outside the domain of life.
It implies therefore a restriction of man's liberty, it
implies a limitation of his strength and energy ; and
it implies further a diminution of the sole source of
fertile and productive labour — namely, egoism ; for
it seeks to withdraw man's admiration for himself and
to centre it on an alleged higher Power. It teaches
him to neglect himself and to sacrifice himself for
others, without apparently perceiving the illogical
character of an argument which is based on an
impossibility ; for if each one were solely actuated by
altruism, none would permit his neighbour to sacrifice
himself for him ; and thus all sacrifice would be
rendered impossible. Christianity, in particular, is
the religion of the lowest classes of humanity, a creed
invented by the slaves, the outcasts, the refuse of
humanity, and reflecting the passions, mean and
contemptible, of these classes. All those passions and
sentiments which enrich and ennoble and beautify
life, '' the affirmative sentiments, pride, joy, health,
the love of the sexes, hatred and war, veneration,
refined taste and manners, a strong will, the culti-
vation of a powerful intellect, the Will of Power,

138

-^

SCIENCE 139

thankfulness for the world and for life, every-
thing that is rich and can give, everything that
brightens and adorns and divinises life for eternity,
the whole force of illuminating virtue," as Neitzsche
writes,^ all these are condemned and persecuted by
Christianity.

But Christianity is to-day a vanishing and dwindling
force. It is not Christianity which to-day moves the
masses. It is not to Christianity that appeal is made
by modem philosophy. English insularism and
prejudice are still accustomed to vain attempts to
reconcile the trend of modern ideas with Christianity.
But the students of Oxford, " home of lost causes,"
and of Cambridge, living in an atmosphere of religious
idealism, see life through a prism. Never has Oxford
merited its historic name better than in its calm
defiance of the progress of scientific research and free
thought . While the great uni vei sities of the Continent
have long since thrown to the winds the mantle of
mysticism and religious inspiration, Oxford and
Cambridge remain still where Butler was, and Paley,
and other worthy defenders of the faith of the
eighteenth century.

Outside England, however, Christianity can no
longer be considered a force — if we except Spain. It
is generally considered that the dogmas of the Church
are irreconcilable with the facts revealed to us by
science. The force of to-day, and certainly the force
of to-morrow, is science. Alike in its practical and
in its theoretical uses, science is the force which appeals
irresistibly to modern humanity. The eye admires the
gigantic ironclad or liner which traverses the Atlantic
in five days, the express which carries the traveller
from Paris to St Petersburg in less than sixty hours,

Werke," xv. 485.

1 "

140 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

the tunnel constructed through the mountains, the
bridge which spans the river or rapids, the electric
lamp which carried on into the night the light of day.
The thinker admires its skilful hypotheses, its minute
and patient analysis, the vast syntheses with which
it is credited, and wrongly credited. And perhaps
another reason for this hold of science upon the
humanity of to-day is that science is essentially a
child of the nineteenth century, and of the latter half
of the nineteenth century, and that its growth and
development are in a sort contemporary of the
growth and development of the living generation.
When we see the astonishing progress made in every
branch of science during the last fifty years, in
mathematics, in astronomy, in physics, in chemistry,
the various biological and psychological sciences, in
sociology, we cease to wonder at the spectacle of
science everywhere replacing the ancient religion as
the moving force and guide of humanity.

But this new faith of humanity, this faith in science,
is it a faith more favourable to the realisation of
Nietzsche's ideal than the old faith ? Does science
favour the development of the only life which is worth
living, of the life which is strong, and powerful, and
exuberant, and rich in creative power ? Does science
help us to realise the only law of life — to live wholly ?
It is according as to whether science be an aid or an
obstacle to the reahsation of the great law of life, that
it must be judged.

The verdict must be that science is an obstacle to
its realisation, and an obstacle scarcely less great than
Christianity itself. Let us look for a moment at the
man of science. He is certainly anything but a great
man. He is a good worker, a patient collector of
details, an exemplary searcher after dusty archives

SCIENCE 141

and old manuscripts. He passes his life in a
laboratory, or in a library, always in the same atmos-
phere, surrounded by the same environment, busy on
the same work, becoming ever more and more special-
ised, till at last his extreme specialisation becomes
fossilisation. This eternal pursuit of the same object,
this perpetual neglect of general culture, this ultra-
specialisation, which are the features of the man of
science, are eminently unfavourable to the develop-
ment of the wide sympathies or varied tastes or
virile instincts, which are the features of the great man.
On the other hand, they are especially favourable to
the growth of a narrow spirit, to the development
of shortsightedness, of fanaticism, of ignorance of
all reality outside that contained in the extremely
narrow sphere of the scientist's specialisation. It will
be objected that the extreme abundance of subject-
matter obliges the scientist to make a specialisation
of some particular branch of the vast tree of know-
ledge. This may be, and incontestably is, perfectly
true ; but it demonstrates the limitations of scien-
tific culture, and proves that this culture is in no way
favourable to the development of life in its integrity,
but very much the reverse.

*' Compared with a genius, that is to say with a
being who creates and conceives, in the highest sense
of both words, the learned man, the scientific medio-
crity, is something of an old maid ; for, like the latter,
he is unable to understand the two most valuable
achievements of man. As a matter of fact, one re-
cognises both of them, the scientist and the old maid,
as highly respectable. Let us examine more closely :
what sort of person is the scientific man ? First of all,
an essentially democratic specimen of mankind, with
all the virtues of such a democratic specimen, that

142 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

is to say of a man unable to command, incapable
of exercising authority, incapable even of self-
sufficiency. He is diligent, patient, orderly, moderate,
always identical in his wants and in his capacities ;
he has all the instincts of his race, and an instinctive
desire for that which is necessary to men of his stamp
— for instance, a modest independence and a green
field, without which quiet, orderly work is impossible ;
honours and distinctions ; the aureole of an honoured
and respected name, which shall set the seal on his
value and utility, the conscience of which must
always serve to repress that secret lack of confidence
which ever lurks in the heart of every dependent man,
of every gregarious animal. The scientist has also
the maladies and tares of an unaristocratic race : he
is full of contemptible envy, and he has the eye of a
lynx for detecting that which is base in the character
of those to whose height he cannot attain.'' ^

And as for the philosophy which is taught by these
narrow-minded scientists :

'' Science flourishes to-day and has an eminently
good conscience ; while that to which the whole of
our modern philosophy has sunk, those remains of
modern philosophy, awaken nothing but suspicion
and discouragement, if not ridicule and sympathy.
Philosophy reduced to a ' theory of knowledge,' as
a matter of fact nothing but a miserable ' doctrine
of fasting' (Enthaltsamkeitslehre) , a philosophy
unable to cross the threshold and which painfully
declines even the privilege of entering — that is
philosophy in its most recent expression, an end,
an agony, something which excites sympathy. How
could such a philosophy — rule ? " ^

^ " Werke," vii. 148.
^ Ibid. vii. 146.

SCIENCE 143

The philosophy of modern science, in so far as we
can call it philosophy, aims at the destruction of
everything which is strong, of everything exceptional,
of everything which is capable of dominating and
menacing. It is essentially the " people's philosophy "
— that is to say, a philosophy of social platitude
and regression. Its dominant note is an aggressive
materialism, whose motto is ' ' Neither God nor master.
Both on the Continent and in Great Britain is this
untoward phenomenon to be observed. In France it
is in the name of science that the work of levelling, of
democratising, of destroying all that is noble or that
aspires to domination, is being pushed forward. Up
till 1870, Germany was the land of great idealism ; the
names of Goethe, of Kant, of Hegel, of Schopenhauer,
in philosophy ; of Beethoven and Wagner in music ;
show us what a nation inspired by great ideals can
achieve. The intellectual culture of Germany during
the latter half of the eighteenth and during the first
half of the nineteenth centuries, was remarkable above
all things for the vastness and power of its synthetic
achievements. What has happened since 1870 ?
Germany has become the land of intense industrial
and commercial activity, the land of militarism and
of individual servitude. Science has flourished in
German universities during the last thirty years,
certainly, and the figure of the German professor has
become legendary. But this triumph of materialistic
science has signified the cessation of all vast synthetic
achievement, sacrificed to minute and painfully
correct works of analysis ; it has signified along with
the ever-increasing power of commercialism the ever-
growing democratisation of the empire, and the con-
tinuous abasement of the national spirit. Science
has no reason to be proud of these results.

144 raE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

The essence of the scientist is cautiousness, patience,
extreme and pedantic dihgence, all of them qualities
unknown, or almost unknown, to the genial spirit,
to the really great mind. The learned man whom
Zarathustra has among his disciples up on the
mountains, and who has spent his whole life in
minutely analysing the cerebral structure of the leech,
is typical of his class. Take the physiologist or the
microbiologist or the chemist in their laboratories, or
the spectacled professor learned in ethics and moral
science ; are these types of great men ? They are
workers, and doubtless useful workers, doubtless
indispensable workers, as their labours serve as
material for the synthetic achievements of the creator,
but they must not be confounded with this creator.
They amass the material, each bringing his little
stock well garnished, each having spent a lifetime in
the examination of an infinitesimal fraction of the
domain of knowledge ; but they are incapable of
anything like a wide view, embracing horizons out-
side their own particular one ; they are incapable of
understanding the meaning of the facts they collect.
It is for the creator to utilise these facts, to utilise
them in the construction of the vast syntheses, of the
tables of moral and metaphysical values, which are as
landmarks in the history of humanity. But precisely
this modern philosophy, this philosophy of modern
science, this materialistic philosophy which is so
favourable to the intense development of commer-
cialism and mercantilism, which regards the produc-
tion of wealth as the end of life, which preaches the
doctrine of the Rights of Man, which flatters the pre-
judices of the ignorant by talk about the sovereignty
of the people ; this philosophy whose aim is the
levelHng and democratisation of everything, whose

SCIENCE 145

dream is universal peace and platitude, whose ideal
is mercantilism pushed to excess, whose means to the
attainment of its end is the destruction of the elite,
this philosophy renders impossible the construction
of these landmarks, by seeking the annihilation of
those who alone are capable of creating them.

Thus modem science, far from being an antithesis
of Christianity, as it falsely pretends to be, is itself
an emanation of Christianity. Like Christianity
it seeks to promote '* well-being,'' " happiness, *'
*' charity," '' pacificism," and other conditions by
means of which the superior and stronger races are
weakened and destroyed. Like Christianity, it is
democratic, it comes from and belongs to the people.
If Christianity sets before its adherents an ideal
which is nihilistic and anti-vital, modern science
gives humanity an ideal which is, perhaps, even more
ignoble — the ideal of wealth and material happiness
as the justification and end of life. The results of
this modern philosophy can be seen in the history of
the last thirty years, in the three greatest nations
of Europe, in France, in England, in Germany. Ever-
growing democratisation, along with an ever-growing
dearth of great thinkers and great men ; the lack of a
robust ideal ; increasing industrial and commercial
activity accompanied by increasing moral stagnation :
such is the net result. Science is as little favourable
to the development of a healthy, strong, courageous
philosophy as ever was Christianity.

K

BOOK II

POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER I

THE WILL OF POWER AS FUNDAMENTAL POSTULATE

We have contented ourselves up till now with a brief
glance at Nietzsche's fundamental idea, the idea
which underlies the whole of his philosophy, and with
a review of the arguments put forward by him against
the chief obstacles to the realisation of his ideal.
We saw Nietzsche's ideal of life to be the integral life
— that is to say, the life which manifests itself freely
and without hindrance, the life which realises all the
possibilities contained in it, the life which gives itself
freely, which creates, and beautifies the world by
its power of artistic creation. But there are many
obstacles to the realisation of this ideal. The modern
State, creation of the inferior classes of humanity, and
designed exclusively to benefit these classes ; Chris-
tianity, the religion of the slaves and the outcasts,
the greatest obstacle of all, from whose doctrines the
very idea of the '' Rechtsstaat '' 4ias been derived ;
the moral law, which subjects man to a law which is
nothing else but the expression of the passions and
prejudices of a class, and which is nothing better than
a diluted Christianism, a sort of hemiplegic Christian-
ism ; finally science itself, by its glorification of the
material to the detriment of the ideal, by the medio-
crity of the culture which it offers, by the levelling
and democratising influence which it exerts, is an
enemy of the life in beauty, in plenitude, and in
power which is Nietzsche's ideal.
149

150 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

The only law of life which we know, probably the
only law of life which exists, certainly the only one we
know, is the law which commands us imperatively
to realise life in all its infinite possibilities, to manifest
life in all its integrity, to live wholly. This being the
only law of life, everything which exists must be
judged according to this law. That which tends to
increase our vitality and to strengthen and beautify
life, is alone '' good/' There is no such thing as
" good in itself *' ; a thing is good or bad according
as to whether, at a given moment, it is profitable or
unprofitable to life. If immorality and cruelty and
falsehood are, for instance, favourable to the develop-
ment of life, to the extension of its power ; and if,
contrariwise, morality and sympathy and truth are
prejudicial to vital development and extension ; then
the law of life commands us to say " yes " to
immorality and cruelty and falsehood, and ''no " to
morality and sympathy and truth.

But the law of life which commands us to realise
life to the utmost of its possibilities is also the law
of the whole of nature, whether organic or inorganic.
Everything which is, tends to persist and to develop.
This is the universal law, inherent to the whole order
of things. But in the domain of both inorganic and
organic life, this tendency of the various forces in
presence is subject to restriction. Space and nourish-
ment are limited, and reduced, for the higher scale of
living being, to very narrow limits. In consequence,
there is a struggle for existence. Every creature
tends to persist and to develop, but only those whose
condition is best adapted to exterior conditions — in
a word, those that are fittest — survive.

Such is the theory of natural selection which
Darwin first applied to the solution of the problem :

THE WILL OF POWER 151

how do variations of species arise ? This theory
starts from the point, which it takes for granted in a
sense a priori, that the law of all hfe is the tendency
to persist and to develop. But, given the conditions
under which alone life is possible and which restrict
the number of those who can find place to live, only
the fittest can survive. Those who adapt themselves
best to their environment will persist at the expense
of those who fail to adapt themselves as well. In a
word, the better-conditioned — that is to say, the
strongest — persist at the expense of the less well-
conditioned — that is to say, of the weaker.

Such is the great biological law. Translated into
other terms, we may thus define the biological law :
the Will of Power as the elementary expression of
Life.

For what do we witness in the operations of the
biological law ? We witness a certain number of
forces at work. Existence being the fact a priori,
we see these forces striving to maintain themselves
— ^that is to say, striving to act — within the limits
of existence. But the action of these forces is not
reciprocal ; it is antagonistic. Action is the condi-
tion of the persistence of these forces, and the greater
the action the stronger the persistence. We witness
the elimination of those forces whose action is weaker
and less developed. Now it may be said that each
of these antagonistic forces is moved by a will to act,
and by a will of power, as each strives, by a more
powerful action, to neutralise the action of the
antagonist forces. The tendency to persist is a
tendency to assert oneself, to increase one's power,
as the very fact of a tendency to persist existing, a
tendency to action, a will of action, is implied ; and
a will of action cannot be other than a tmll of power.

152 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

as the aim of action is maintenance, persistence,
development — that is to say. Power.

Now let us apply this concept of the Will of Power
not merely to the world of organic and inorganic
nature, but also to the ideological world, to the world
of our ideas and concepts. What do we witness in the
ideological world ? We witness also a number of
forces at work, each striving to persist — that is to say,
each of them acting, and acting in view of their
maintenance, persistence and development — that is
to say, in view of their power. In other words, each
force of the ideological world — each idea, therefore —
is actuated, just as the forces of biological nature, by
a will of power. The forces of the ideological world,
however, are not actuated by a Will of Power inherent
to them. The world of ideas has no existence in
itself, independent of us. The Will of Power mani-
fested consequently in the ideological world is but
the expression of a power which exists as reflection
in the ideological world, and which is inherent only
in us.

The Will of Power is that which is fundamental in
the world. It is the elementary fact, which we must
accept as being, in a sense, a priori. As origin and
beginning we can see only one thing — Force. A
number of forces stand in presence, and the history of
the world is a history of the action of these forces —
in other words, of the manifestations of the Will of
Power. The central idea and fundamental postulate
of Nietzsche is this : there is no force superior to force.
And this is no tautology. Up till now we have always
imagined, or tried to imagine — or at least all the
religions and philosophies since the time of Socrates
have tried to imagine — that there is something
superior to force — namely, the idea. The religions

THE WILL OF POWER 153

called this latter God, the philosophers gave it
different names, and under those different names
it is always recognisable as the moral law. This is
precisely what Nietzsche calls in question when he
proclaims that *' there is no force superior to force/'
Everything which is, tends to persist. Natural selec-
tion determines the persistence of those types which
adapt themselves the best to their conditions of life.
The play of natural selection begins already within the
atom, among the electrones or corpuscules which
compose it.^ Everywhere we can see nothing but the
reign of force, the action of one force producing a
second force or eliminating a third force. The uni-
versal law is : struggle for existence, survival of the
fittest. The fittest are the best — that is to say, the
most adapted to the conditions of their environment
at a given moment — that is to say, the strongest with
regard to a certain set of conditions. But the signi-
fication of the word '' fittest '' is purely relative.
Change the conditions and the fittest of yesterday
may be the least fit of to-day. Instability would thus
appear to be the characteristic of the law of life. The
words '' fittest '' and '' best '' must be always under-
stood in reference to a given set of conditions which
determine what is fittest and best at a given moment.
Thus everywhere the law of life is the same :
tendency to persist. Life everywhere and under all
its forms, whether in the atom or in the vertebrate or
in the idea which is the projection of the laws of the
human understanding, tends to manifest itself, to
develop itself in all its plenitude, to realise the
maximum of life. The tendency is universal ; but the
possibility of realising that tendency is limited, owing

^ Vide Professor Darwin's Presidential Address to the British
Association, at the meeting of 1905, at Capetown.

154 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

to the conditions of existence, which permit only of
its realisation by the strongest — that is to say, those
who are best adapted to those conditions of existence.
It is force which is victorious over the less strong.
Life, in its universal tendency to persist, always seeks
those means for realising its aim which are best suited
to that realisation. Every condition which favours
the development of life, consequently the realisation
of the law of life, is good. Thus the standard by
which all things must be judged is their utility to life
at a given moment and in given conditions.

Darwin was the first to apply the fruitful principle
of natural selection to the world of organic nature.
It has since been applied with conspicuous success to
the domain of inorganic nature, and we have been
shown its action on the struggle for existence between
the component elements of the atom. But scientists
as well as metaphysicians have always taken for
granted the existence of certain laws of nature,
immutable and eternal, to the operation of which
the whole cosmological process is subject.

Nietzsche has pushed the theory of natural selection
and of the survival of the fittest further on into the
domain of the ideological world, and by those means
he has endeavoured to strike at the very roots of all
scientific belief. Science regards the world, life,
humanity, as the manifestation of a force certainly,
but of a cosmic force, eternal and immutable, inde-
pendent of humanity. The cosmic force, the world-
substance, takes on different forms, and the idea is
but a particular emanation of a particular combina-
tion of the cosmic force with a specified and highly
specialised condition of matter. The individual is,
indeed, a manifestation of the cosmic process, of the

THE WILL OF POWER 155

world-substance ; but he has conscience of the whole
of which he forms a part, through the medium of
certain universal laws, of which the law of causality
is the most important.

Nietzsche has inverted the position adopted by all
thinkers up till the present day. For him, it is not
the individual who is a manifestation of the world-
substance, but the alleged world-substance is but an
emanation of the individual, a projection of the laws
of his intelligence through space and time.

But this position is no novelty, it will be urged.
Innumerable are the philosophers who have pushed
scepticism to a denial of the reality of the outer world.
Berkeley certainly preceded Nietzsche on this ground,
and Hegel and Fichte and Schopenhauer, to mention
only the most celebrated. All these thinkers, how-
ever important the divergencies between them on
other points, were agreed in placing the centre of
things in the human mind, in making the world the
representation of that mind, the reflection of its in-
telligence. Nietzsche is far from being an innovator
on the ground of subjectivism.

This is perfectly true. And, more especially, the
theory of Schopenhauer of the world as will and
representation has been extensively utilised by Nietz-
sche. But where Nietzsche did certainly innovate,
where he unquestionably did effect a reform in the
history of philosophy, as M. de Gaultier has pointed
out, was with his conception of ** no force superior
to force." ^ For every thinker antecedent to Nietz-
sche has admitted the law of causality and the
mathematical^ axioms, for instance. Every thinker
antecedent to Nietzsche has admitted the existence

^ Jules de Gaultier : *' Nietzsche et la Reforme Philosophique."
(Paris, au Mercure de France , 1904).

156 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

of certain immutable laws of nature, by virtue of
which we ourselves exist and without which we should
not exist. Berkeley, who denied us the right of
arguing from phenomena to noumena ; Schopenhauer,
for whom the world exists only as the mirror of our-
selves, as our representation — both admitted certain
fundamental laws of nature, by virtue of which we
are able to reason. It has always been held that
only in virtue of certain immutable laws of nature
do we exist, only in virtue of these laws can we
know and perceive and reason.

In particular the notions of space and time have
always been regarded as given a priori, as having
an existence in themselves, as necessary to all know-
ledge. According to Kant, space is not an empirical
concept, for in order to perceive something as material
it is necessary to refer our sensations to something
external to us ; therefore the representation of space
exists previously to those objects which we project
into space. Experience is possible only by the
representation of space, and cannot give birth to
the notion of space. Time is likewise an intuition
a priori, condition of succession and change.

Humanity has, during a certain period of its
intellectual evolution, always striven after a form of
reality distinct from reality itself. This effort attains
its most vehement expression in the domain of
ideology, and translates itself into the pretended
discovery of a *' thing in itself " behind the pheno-
menal world, of a transcendental moral law, and
of a transcendental aesthetic law (employed in the
usual sense of the word " aesthetic,'' and not as Kant
employs it). The idealistic school have denied the
validity of the phenomenal world, only to affirm the
reality of the noumenal world. The materiahst

THE WILL OF POWER 157

school have rejected the noumenal world, only to
affirm the reality of phenomena. Every theory of
knowledge is based on the assumption that knowledge
has a value in itself, that certain laws of knowledge
are immutable, such as those of causality in space
and of succession in time. Thus Kant affirms
that the '' transcendental idealism of the concept of
space finds its counterpart in its empirical reality/' ^

The history of philosophy since Plato, according
to Nietzsche, has been the history of an error.
This error has consisted in separating the idea from
that which gave it birth, from the Force which
engendered it. The idea, separated from its cause,
has been set up as a cause, whereas it is in reality
a resultant. Thus Plato's " pure spirit '' erected
into an independent entity ; thus Kant's faculty
of forming synthetic judgments a priori ; thus
Schelling's ''intellectual intuition"; thus Schopen-
hauer's principle of practical reason. Thus also
the assumption of causality, of space and time,
as conditions a priori of experience ; thus the
assumption of certain mathematical postulates as
axiomatic truths. It has not been seen that all
these supposed faculties of the mind, these principles
of reasoning, these laws of logic, are but expressions
of a force antecedent and superior to them, and
which has created them.

What are in reality these ideas which humanity
has grown to consider as a priori conditions of
all knowledge, as given, as undisputed truths in
themselves ? For instance the ideas of space and
time and causality, which have been admitted by
all philosophers as conditions precedent, as given,
and given as the conditions of existence, and given
Kritik der reinen Vemunft " (ed. Hartenstein), p. 69.

1 *t

158 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

just as existence itself is given. These ideas are
but the expressions of a force which has created them.
Humanity, finding itself in certain conditions of
existence, required knowledge as a necessary means
of persisting, of maintaining itself. The ideas of
causality, of space and time, are ideas which, under
the actual conditions of existence, prove most
beneficial to humanity as a means of acquiring
knowledge, consequently as a means to maintaining
itself in the struggle for life. These ideas have no
reality whatsoever in themselves ; they represent
the truth for humanity under certain conditions, and
the truth is an instrument in the struggle for exist-
ence, and, should perchance the actual conditions
of existence change, the truth of to-day would no
longer be the truth of to-morrow, and the concepts
which we regard as conditioning life to-day would
perhaps have to be inverted to-morrow. In a sense,
we may regard the ideas of causality, of space
and time, as a priori conditions of existence ; but
only as regards the actual conditions of existence.
These ideas have no reality in themselves ; in the
beginning it is possible that many concepts of
reality were in presence ; and if the concepts which
we regard to-day as immutable, those of causality,
of space and time, have survived, it is because these
concepts are the best adapted to the conditions of
existence, it is because they are necessary to exist-
ence, in the sense that, knowledge being an essential
condition of the maintenance of the species in the
struggle for life, and these concepts giving that
knowledge which is best adapted to its maintenance,
these concepts may be regarded as indispensable
instruments Jor the preservation of the lije of the
species.

THE WILL OF POWER 159

Thus the idea of the struggle for Ufe, apphed with
such success by Darwin to the world of organic life,
and extended since his time to the world of inorganic
nature, is applied by Nietzsche to the domain of
abstract knowledge. If an idea be regarded as true,
and be regarded as true by the universal consent of
mankind, as is the case with the ideas of space,
time and causality, it is not because that idea
possesses any reality in itself ; there is but one
reality of which we have conscience, and that reality
is Force, of which the law of life is an expression ;
it is because that idea is necessary to the existence
of the species under given conditions. But we
may very well conceive of a species placed under
different conditions of existence, and to whom our
concepts of knowledge, such as the ideas of causality,
of space and time, would be unknown. The ideo-
logical world is a '' table of values " ] its contents
are not entities in themselves, but represent each
a certain '' value '' to humanity in the struggle for
existence. The error of philosophers has consisted
in neglecting the fundamental concepts of know-
ledge as factors in the struggle for life, and in con-
sidering them only in themselves.

In placing ourselves at this point of view, the
controversy as to the validity of these fundamental
concepts disappears. As to whether the ideas of
space and time and causality have empirical reality,
we can answer : no. The sole reality of the entities
of the ideological world consists in their greater or
less utility for humanity. The foundations of know-
ledge possess thus merely a utilitarian value. Truth
is not an entity superior to humanity, exterior to
humanity, immutable and independent. Truth is
synonymous with what is useful for the maintenance

160 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

of the species. Truth is an instrument in the
struggle for existence ; that which the species finds
to be best adapted to its preservation, that is " truth '*
to the species. And that which is best adaptable to
certain conditions, consequently that which repre-
sents *' truth '' under certain conditions, may become
I untruth and falsehood under other vital conditions.
When Nietzsche says that he will prefer falsehood
to truth should falsehood be proved to have greater
value to life, he is speaking of the metaphysical
fiction of truth, which represents it as fixed and
immutable, and which, under the form of the moral
law, is the concrete expression of the prejudices of
a particular class. The metaphysical trans valua-
tion of all the natural values has made truth into
an independent and immutable entity ; whereas
the natural evaluation of truth shows truth to be
merely synonymous with that which is most useful
to the life of the race under certain conditions.

The eternal pursuit of the various philosophic
schools after truth resembles the efforts of the
alchemists to convert every metal into gold. Like
the alchemists, the philosophers are pursuing a
chimera which has no existence. Once we apply
the theory of natural selection and of the survival
of the fittest to the domain of abstract knowledge ;
once we recognise the fact that the ideological world
is but the expression of that force which manifests
itself in the law of life itself ; we shall recognise also
the fact that truth is something necessarily relative,
necessarily non-existent as an expression of the
absolute. The world of ideas is the expression of a
force which causes everything that is, to persist.
It is the Will of Power of a race which, tending to
persist in the struggle for life, selects for the assertion

THE WILL OF POWER 161

of its power those weapons best adapted to the con-
ditions of the struggle. The concepts of space and
time and causaUty are true because they give us that
knowledge which best adapts itself to our situation.
Without knowledge we could not exist as a species ;
but our knowledge is not true in itself, it is not
knowledge in itself, it is perhaps a perpetual illusion
and a dupery ; but that illusion has proved to be
indispensable to us. However, let us not think
that knowledge, as applied to humanity, signifies
anything but a force in the struggle for existence,
a force which is useful for the maintenance of the
species.

It is in the domain of abstract reasoning that
Nietzsche's position startles us as if it were some
gigantic paradox. Truth is abolished as an entity
in itself, and those most fundamental concepts on
which our whole theory of knowledge is based, the
notions of causality, of space, of time. We are
living, perhaps, in a vast illusion, at all events in
a world which has no existence of which we have
any knowledge, for our knowledge is but a form of
adaptation to our environment. But how, it may
well be objected, can under these circumstances our
environment be an illusion ? Given the fact of our
environment, our adaptation to it under the form of
knowledge surely shows that our knowledge is not
mere dupery.

Turning to the domain of morals, Nietzsche has
attacked, and most brilliantly attacked, that idea
of an independent moral law which Kant has termed
" Das Gute an sich.'' As a matter of fact, the moral
law, in the history of philosophy, seems to have
originated with Socrates and Plato, both of whom
Nietzsche has rightly recognised as precursors of

162 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Christianity.^ What is this moral law which
triumphed with Christianity, which triumphed with
the Kantian philosophy, with the French Revolution,
which triumphs to-day with modern ideas ? The
moral law is but a symbol of the Will of Power,
of a force which has become idealised, in order that,
by means of its identification with the world of
alleged noumena, its value as a means of affirming
the power of those who invented it, as a means of
combat, may be enhanced. In the world of morals,
as in the world of knowledge, the metaphysical idea
of truth is the purest fiction. Truth is, in morals
as in knowledge, merely a means to an end ; and the
end is the affirmation of a certain race, of a certain
type, of a certain species. We will come later to
Nietzsche's theory of the two systems of morals —
that of the masters, and that of the slaves. It
suffices to say here that, according to Nietzsche, the
masters, or superior and eugenic races, regard] as
moral everything that we to-day, under the reign
of the supremacy of the inferior races, regard as
immoral. For the masters, good is synonymous with
strength and power and beauty and courage, ruthless,
unscrupulous, ferocious. The slaves, unable to com-
bat the masters with their own weapons, adopted the
moral law as their instrument in the struggle for
supremacy. With Christianity the inferior races
triumphed, and immediately a transvaluation of the
ancient values, those of the masters, was effected.
The qualities of the inferior races, weakness,

^ Nietzsche has made a violent attack on Socrates in the
" GotzendammeiTing," in which he describes him as " belonging
by birth to the lowest class of the people, to the rabble," and
throws doubts on the genuineness of his Greek origin (" Werke,"
viii. 68-75).

THE WILL OF POWER 163

cowardice, ruse, patience, were elevated to the
rank of virtues, and baptised with new names
(love, charity, forgiveness, meekness), and identified
with an alleged eternal and higher state of things,
which are not of this world but above it. In this
way, the inferior race assured a greater stability
to its triumph. Identified with the world of
noumena, or of supernature, the moral law, instru-
ment of combat, was less liable to be called in ques-
tion. The origin of the moral law as an expression
of the Will of Power of an inferior race, struggling for
supremacy, is thus overlooked.

In the domain of knowledge as in the domain of
morals — and also in that of art — there is no such
entity as a '' thing in itself." Everything must be
measured with regard to its utility for the human
species at a given moment and in certain conditions.
That which we call truth is but an instrument of
combat, it is synonymous with that which assures
the supremacy of a race or of a species. Reality
there is none other than the Will of Power, of which
the law of life is the manifestation, and which is
synonymous with the force that causes everything
which is, to persist in being. It is in obedience to
that force that we select those instruments best
adapted to the realisation of that tendency. Those
instruments we call " true," but they are only
instruments in the service of the Universal Force,
neither immutable nor eternal, but changing accord-
ing as the conditions of existence themselves change.

CHAPTER II

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE AS EXPRESSION OF THE

WILL OF POWER

We have seen that Nietzsche appUes rigorously the
theory of natural selection to the domain of ideology.
Our knowledge is not knowledge in itself, but the
expression of an adaptation to a certain environment.
That which we know, or think we know, is a purely
subjective creation ; or rather it is not even subjective,
for the " subject " is itself a resultant ; we have no
knowledge of subject or object ; since we have no
knowledge at all in the exact sense of the word. That
which we call knowledge is simply that which is
useful to the life of the species, which aids the species
in persisting ; it is a manifestation of the Will of
Power of that species. As such it possesses neither
immutability nor a value in itself apart from those
conditions under which it is created by the species.
As Dr Rudolf Eisler writes :

" The forms of our thought-process, according to
Nietzsche, do not reflect in any way the reality of
things, but only serve to co-ordinate the chaotic ele-
ments of our experience. Far from reproducing the
conditions of reality, they tend rather to falsify the con-
tent of our experience . The categories of the understand-
ing are nothing hut the humanisation of our experience
(' ' Vermenschlichungen der Erf ahrung " ) . They do not
proceed from experience, are not caused or motivated
by experience, and are not inborn concepts reposing on
supernatural knowledge. On the contrary, they are
produced in and through experience, they are caused

164

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 165

by psycho-physical shortcomings, by the weakness of
our organs of sense, of our memory, of our language.
Fantasy is the real origin of the categories. Having
thus been produced, they become fixed by selection
and heredity, become universally valid, and in this
sense, in their relation to every individual experience,
they become a priori. As conditions of the maintenance
of life they are also conditions of all ' knowledge.'
They form a series of acquired errors, suitable to the
persistence of species ; the world which they postulate
is not experienced ; however, once one knows the
history of the origin of the categories, there is no sense
in supposing them to possess any validity as expres-
sions of Reality.'' ^

Nietzsche has himself written :

*' The categories are ' truths ' in that sense only,
that they are conditions of life for us : just as the
Euclidian space is such a conditional 'truth.' In a
word : as no one will sustain the necessity of the
existence of a human species, so is our reason, just
like the space of Euclid, a mere idiosyncrasy of certain
species, one amongst many." *

Truth is thus a necessary illusion, if one may use
the expression, without which a given species of liv-
ing beings could not persist, could not maintain life.
The value of that illusion as a condition for the main-
tenance of life determines its value as an element of
knowledge. According as to whether it possesses a
positive or a negative value it will be classed as true
or untrue. Where philosophers have committed an
error, and a very serious error, is in their non-recogni-
tion of this origin of all those concepts of knowledge

^ R. Eisler : " Nietzsches Erkenntnisstheorie und Metaphysik,"
p. 21 (Leipzig, 1902).
* " Werke," xv. 278.

166 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

which we are accustomed to consider as fundamental.
They have given those concepts an independent
existence, and have overlooked the fact that they
represent nothing more than a means to an end — that
they are a symbol of the Will of Power which mani-
fests itself in the law of life and which, pushing every
living being to persist in being, pushes it also to select
those weapons for its defence which are best adapted
to that purpose. Knowledge is an instrument of
combat. The fact of certain ideas, such as those
of space and time and causality, being accepted as
universally valid, merely proves the supreme value
of these concepts as a means of maintaining and
developing life, nothing more.

The categorical imperative which commands us to
search after truth must be able to justify itself as
a means of maintaining the life of the species, as an
expression of the Will of Power. Our passion for
Beauty is likewise an expression of the Will of Power
— of the will of creation. The '' thing in itself " and
** beauty in itself '' reduce themselves to the same
fundamental Will of Power. Why do we desire to
know reality ? What is the secret of this thirst after
knowledge which is everywhere manifested ? Be-
cause knowledge is a means of gaining power, of sub-
jecting the world to our power. That world alone is
comprehensible for us which is our own creation.

'' Knowledge acts as the instrument of power.
It follows therefore that knowledge increases accord-
ing as our power increases. What is the meaning of
knowledge ? Here, as in the case of the moral values
' good ' and ' bad,' is the idea to be taken in a strictly
biological sense. In order that a given species may
persist and develop its power, it must calculate its
conception of reality in such a way as to be able to

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 167

construct by means of this conception a plan of
existence. The usefulness of knowledge — not some
abstract theoretical desire not to be deceived — is the
real motive which underlies the development of the
organs of knowledge ; these develop themselves in
such a way that, by observing the results obtained by
them, we are able to maintain ourselves in existence.
In other words, a quantity of knowledge depends upon
the degree in which the Will of Power of a species
develops itself ; a species conceives a certain quality
and quantity of Reality, in order to become master
of that reality, in order to press that reality into its
service. . . .

" There is neither ' Spirit,' nor Reason, nor thought,
nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth ; all
these are useless fictions. There is no question of
subject or object, there is only question of a given
species, which can persist only if it possesses a
relatively right idea of things. Especially is a relative
regularity of its perceptions necessary.'' ^

Here we must note again that the words *' will "
and '* truth " are to be read in their metaphysical
sense — as '' free will " and as an eternal and immut-
able truth external to humanity and superior to it.

Thus the most widely believed ''truths" — such as
the law of causality for instance, which philosophers
have wrongly considered as being a priori to all experi-
ence— are for Nietzsche nothing better than concepts
which must be accepted for the present, until new
conditions of life favour the rise of new concepts,
adaptable to those new conditions. This belief in
certain alleged universal truths is a belief without
which the existence of the species would in all prob-
ability be menaced. But the truth, immutable and

' " Werke," xv. 275.

168 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

eternal, of these concepts is not proved by this
necessity of beheving in them ; for such truth is not
dependent on the mere existence of humanity. The
two quahties which Kant recognised as constituting
the criterion of the truth of a proposition — ix. its
universahty and its necessity — merely demonstrate
that such a proposition is '' true " in the sense of being
necessary to the persistence of the species under
certain conditions. But such a proposition does not
quit the region of belief ; and it is a belief conditioned
by circumstances independent of it.

The position of Nietzsche is clear. The only
reality of which we can have any knowledge, and we
can have knowledge of it only because we are ourselves
emanations of this reality, is force. We witness an
innumerable quantity of forces in presence, each force
antagonistic to the other, each striving to persist at
the expense of the other, the stronger and fittest
persisting at the expense of the weaker and less fit.
Life is but the manifestation of this Universal Force,
and the law of life is the realisation of the maximum of
life. We witness the struggle for existence, struggle
of species against species, struggle of each species
against the brute forces of nature. The Will of Power,
inherent in each type, and which is the law of life,
the Will of Power which pushes every species to
seek to acquire greater power, every individual to seek
to acquire greater power — that Will it is which is
expressed in the whole world of ideas : in the theory
of knowledge, which is the instrument of our preserv-
ation in a chaos which we know not, and of which we
can only render ourselves the masters on conditions
that we co-ordinate its elements, which is synonymous
with subordinating them ; in the theory of morals,
which are the expression of a particular race of men

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 169

at a particular time, striving after power. Placed
in a chaos which would otherwise submerge us, the
imperative necessity of our maintenance orders us to
co-ordinate the elements of this chaos, to harmonise
them, to know them, so that we may subordinate them
and press them into our service. But were the con-
ditions other than they are, so would our efforts to
co-ordinate and subordinate the elements of our
surroundings be other than they are, and would
express themselves in a theory of knowledge adapted
to the changed conditions. But are we justified in
arguing that, because our ideas of space and time
and causality and succession, etc., have been formed
as means of adaptation to an environment, therefore
those ideas must reflect the reality of that environ-
ment ? Nietzsche replies in the negative. What is
alone real is the Will of Power, everywhere active
under manifold forms, but one in substance, and which
manifests itself in life, and in the law inherent to life
of realising the maximum of vital strength.

'* That between subject and object a sort of ade-
quate relation exists ; that the object is something
which, seen as an internal perception, would be as
the subject ; this is a good-natured legend which has
done its time. The measure of all things known to
us is the raw necessity of cognition. How can we,
from this standpoint, attribute to subject or object
predicates at all in conformity with Reality ? '' ^

" The aflirmation : ' I believe that this and this be
true,' as condition of truth : — in every such estima-
tion is expressed a condition of maintenance and
development. All our senses and organs of know-
ledge are evolved with a view to the maintenance and
development of the species. The belief in Reason and

^ " Werke," xv. 273.

170 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

in its categories, in dialectic, in the value of logic,
proves only the usejulness which experience has
shown these to possess for the persistence of life,
not in any way their ' truth/

" That a quantity of belief must exist ; that judg-
ments are necessary ; that no doubt exists with regard
to all important concepts : — this is a condition
necessary for all life ; consequently, it is essential
that something should he believed to he true — not that
something really is true." ^

Questions as to the substance or form of the
" thing in itself,'' considered independently of the re-
ceptivity of the senses or of the activity of the
understanding, must be brushed aside with the
further question : How can we know that a '' thing ''
exists ? The world of '' things '' is our invention.
Many other species may very probably have many
differently conceived worlds of '' things,'' equally
*' true " for them, because as necessary to their
maintenance and development as ours is to us.
Nietzsche poses the question ''as to whether our
faculty for creating, logicising, co-ordinating, falsifying
be not itself the best guaranteed Reality. In a word,
if that which supposes the existence of ' things ' be not
alone real ? And if the ' effect of the outer world on
us ' be not also the resultant of the subjective will ?
. . . Other beings react on us ; our made-up world of
illusions is a co-ordination and subordination of their
action, a sort of weapon of defence." ^

Nietzsche differs from his master, Schopenhauer,
in that the former suppresses everything which is not
pure Becoming, whereas the latter's Will is essentially
Being. Beyond the world of phenomena, Nietzsche
leaves nothing. There is no reality distinct from

* Werke, xv. 273-274. ^ Ibid. xv. 280-281.

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 171

phenomena, and the world of truth itself, as an
entity apart, does not exist.

'' How the world of truth became at last a fable*
The history of an error.

*' i. The world of truth, attainable by the wise, the
pious, the virtuous — the virtuous man lives in the
world of truth, he is the world of truth.

[Most ancient form of the Idea, relatively clever,
simple, convincing. Another rendering of the pro-
position : '' I, Plato, am the truth." ]

''ii. The world of truth, unattainable at present, but
promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous — to the
sinner that repents.

[Progress of the Idea ; it becomes more vaporous,
less difficult to seize hold of — ^it becomes jemale,
Christian. . . .]

*' iii. The world of truth, unattainable, unproveable,
not promised, but a thought which brings comfort ;
a duty, an imperative.

[The erstwhile sunshine appears, but veiled in
fog and scepticism ; the Idea become sublime, pale,
northerly, Konigsbergian.]

'' iv. The world of truth — unattainable ? At all
events unattained. And also unknown. Conse-
quently neither comforting nor imperative : how
could something unknown act as an imperative ?

[Gray morning. First yawn of Reason. Cockcrow
of Positivism.]

'' V. The world of truth — an Idea which is quite
useless, which binds us to nothing— an unnecessary,
superfluous Idea, consequently a refuted Idea : let
us abolish it !

[Broad daylight ; breakfast ; return of " bon
sens '' and merriment ; Plato blushes ; great jubilancy
of all free thinkers.]

172 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

'' vi. We have suppressed the world of truth : what
world remains ? The world of illusions, perhaps ?
But no ! Together with the world oj truth, we have
suppressed also the world oj illusions /

[Midday ; moment of the shortest darkness ; end
of the longest error ; summit of humanity ; Incipit
Zarathustra.] '' ^

This is the great secret which Zarathustra comes
to preach to mankind. Zarathustra is a sceptic, and
pushes scepticism to the length of ceasing to believe
that he believes, thus :

'' In the domain of science it is said, and rightly
said, conviction finds no place. Only when science
resolves to content itself with a modest hypothesis,
with an experimental ' for the present ' standpoint,
then only can it be allowed to take place within
the realm of knowledge. . . . Does this not mean,
in other words, that first when conviction ceases to he
conviction, can it find a place as an element of know-
ledge ? " ^

Belief in the objective reality of truth as an entity
superior to humanity, and disassociated from its
conception as a means to the maintenance and
development of the species under given conditions,
as an emanation of the Will of Power of a species,
such a belief is purely metaphysical. '' There can be
no doubt about it, the believer in truth, the man who
is truthful in the sense of believing in science, affirms
through that belief his faith in the existence of a world
other than the world of Nature, of Life, of History ;
and in so far as he affirms the existence of this
' other ' world, must he not in the same measure deny
its counterpart, which is this world of ours ? One

^ " Werke," viii. 82, 83.
" Ihid. V. 272.

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 173

understands what I mean — namely, that our belief
in science is a metaphysical belief — that we, too,
the learned men of to-day, we atheists and anti-
metaphysicians, we also light our fire with that
same brand which has kindled the flames of beliefs
thousands of years old, which ignited the torch of
the Christian faith, which was also the faith of
Plato, the belief that God is true and that truth is
divine/' ^

Science, which claims to have reversed the old
faiths, which is supposed to be the antithesis of
metaphysical thought, is in reality profoundly meta-
physical. If the world is abandoning its beliefs in
the dogmas of Christianity, that essential belief which
constitutes the kernel of Christianity, as it constitutes
the kernel of every religion and of every philosophy
— the belief in truth as an immutable essence, above
the world of phenomena and abstracted from the con-
ditions of the struggle for existence, remains also the
heritage of modern science.

*' The negativists of to-day, those who demand
most uncompromisingly the severest intellectual
probity, these hardened, strong, heroic intellects
which are the honour of our time, all these pale
atheists, antichristians, immoralists, nihilists . . .
these last idealists of knowledge in whom alone lives
to-day the spirit of intellectual conscientiousness —
they believe themselves to be as far removed as
possible from any ascetic ideal, these free, very free,
thinkers ; and yet . . . this ideal is precisely their
ideal. . . . They are not free thinkers, for they still
believe in truth. When the Christian Crusaders fell
in with that invincible Order of the Assassins, with
that order of free thinkers par excellence, whose

^^^Werke," v. 275.

174 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

inferior members lived in an obedience such as no
monastic order has ever known, they obtained, I
know not how, some information with regard to the
famous symbol, with regard to that essential principle
of the order, the knowledge of which was exclusively
reserved for the superior dignitaries, sole depositaries
of this ultimate secret : ' Nothing is true, everything
is allowed/ Well, that was freedom of thought, a
freedom which allowed of the belief in truth itself
being negatived/' ^

This symbol of the Order of the Assassins, Nietzsche
has made it his own. For him, as we have seen, truth
is but the expression of the Will of Power, everywhere
active, manifesting itself in life, requiring all life to
endeavour to realise the maximum of vitality within
it. Truth is but an instrument for the realisation of
this end. It is true, all that which embellishes and
strengthens life and adds to its creative power. If
we find that immorality is more useful to life than
morality ; or should we find some other categories
of the understanding more useful to life than those of
substance and cause, of unity and plurality ; or should
we discover that our concepts of space and time do not
respond in an adequate measure to our Will of Power,
to our desire to increase our power by subordinating
the chaotic elements of our environment to us : then
we should have to prefer immorality, to create new
categories, and new concepts of knowledge. And
precisely the creation of new values is the noblest task
of the creator, of the Over-Man whose advent Zara-
thustra has come to preach. Life is a vast field of
experiments for the creator ; it exists solely as a means
for affording the creator of values scope for his activity;
the creator is life's justification ; and the task of the

^ Werke, v. 468-469.

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 175

creator is to render life ever more beautiful, ever more
fertile, ever more powerful. To attain this end,
destruction is as necessary as creation. For the old
values, those values which represent the work of an
inferior element, and which hinder the progress of life,
which sap its vitality by seeking to destroy the only
real sources of that vitality — these old values must
be destroyed before the new ones can be revealed.
Zarathustra has come as a great destroyer as well as
a great creator.

It may be asked whether Nietzsche has not, by the
extreme scepticism which he displays in the domain
of abstract theoretical reasoning, himself destroyed
his own position. By admitting that our categories
of the understanding, and also the fundamental
concepts of space and time, are " true " for us in so
far as they represent the best means of preserving the
life of the species in the struggle for existence, he has
admitted their truth in the only case in which these
concepts or the categories interest us. Existence
being given, and certain conditions being given, it
ensues that the natural tendency of every living being
to persist, will translate itself in the forging of those
instruments best adapted to that ultimate purpose.
The world of truth which should exist outside this
world of ours, as an entity apart, would not have the
slightest interest for us. It is evident that for us the
only truth which counts, is that which adapts us to
our environment and so increases our power and our
vitality. But is it any less the '' truth '' because of
this ? Does not the fact that certain concepts — such
as those of space and time — are universally accepted,
prove that there does exist some adequate relation
between our theory of knowledge and Reality ?
Granted that Nietzsche's proposition be correct, that

176 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

our concepts of reality and the categories of the under-
standing have been formed because these concepts and
these categories are the best means of subordinating
our environment to us, of increasing our Will of Power
— does the fact that the origin of those concepts and
categories is to be found in the struggle for existence
in any sense invalidate them ? Quite the contrary.
The fact that certain concepts possess a universally
recognised validity shows these concepts to be true —
true for us, in our present conditions of existence, and
that is sufficient. Speculation as to what may be the
concepts formed by other species, in other conditions
of existence, or as to what might be ours were our
conditions of existence changed, is an unfruitful
labour.

And even Nietzsche himself is compelled to admit
the existence of a '' truth,'' which is the Will of
Power. We may suppress the world of noumena and
of phenomena, we may even suppress the '* ego,'' and
argue, as does Nietzsche, that already the supposition
of a subject is '' etwas Hinzuerdichtetes " ; but we
cannot suppress the fact of existence itself. That
primordial fact we are obliged to accept as truth.
The various conditions of existence and our knowledge
of them may be, and very likely are, as Nietzsche says,
" Annahmen bis auf Weiteres." But so far, at any
rate, our knowledge of them, limited and very greatly
limited as it is, is true in its fundamental postulates.
How would it be possible to imagine our being able
to subordinate the chaotic elements of our environ-
ment without knowledge of those elements ? Nietz-
sche admits that it is precisely in view of such
subordination that we have forged the instruments
of our knowledge, invented our concepts of space and
time, imagined the categories of the understanding.

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 177

But how, if our knowledge of the elements of our
environment were the opposite of Reality, if our
conception of Reality were radically false — how could
we, with such a false conception, subordinate these
elements, render ourselves masters of that Reality ?
Nietzsche's argument results in an impasse. He
does not endeavour to escape from it. Nietzsche never
tries to escape from the consequences of his argu-
ments, for he is too proud, too brave, and also too
loyal, to do so. So he boldly proclaims that ''it is
essential that something should be believed to be true
— not that something is really true.'' But what is the
meaning of this proposition ? Why is it essential that
A should be believed to be true ? Because A is
necessary to our existence, replies Nietzsche. But if
A be not really true — that is to say, if A be not an
adequate expression of some definite relation between
ourselves and reality — how can A be necessary to our
existence ?

If Nietzsche had defended his position on the ground
that the fact that we have knowledge of certain
elements which stand in adequate relationship be-
tween ourselves and the reality of which we form a
part, does not give us the right to argue as to the
nature either of these elements or of Reality itself :
there is nothing to urge against this position, which
is the Agnostic position pushed to its logical conse-
quences. As to the nature of life and the world, we
are as far advanced to-day as we were before the era
of nineteenth-century science. What we desire to
make clear, is that Nietzsche's definition of truth
as a manifestation of the Will of Power, and as an
instrument in the struggle for existence, does not
invalidate in any way the idea of truth. Our sense
organs have their origin also as instruments in the

M

178 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

struggle for existence, and yet retain all their value for
the species. In the same way, our concepts of space
and time, by the mere fact of their being necessary
to life, are true for us, and have their value for us.
Nietzsche proclaims that a conviction must cease to
be a conviction before it can enter the domain of
knowledge, and yet he admits that '' without certain
convictions the species would be annihilated," which
is exact. He thus arrives at a contradiction with
himself.

To sum up : Nietzsche's fundamental idea, that
our concepts of knowledge, and the categories of the
understanding, are empirical in their origin, and take
their rise as instruments of the Will of Power of the
species in the struggle for existence, is exact, to our
mind ; and we certainly think it far more rational
than Kant's theory of the origin of the categories.
But where we think Nietzsche wrong is in his attempt
to deny that our ideas of space and time, and other
fundamental concepts of knowledge, in so far as they
are means adapted to establishing a relative equi-
librium between ourselves and our environment,
furnish us with a true representation of that environ-
ment. Certainly, we fully concur that the repre-
sentation thus afforded us of Reality is an inadequate
representation ; it is far from embracing the totality
of the conditions of Reality ; but the representation
given us is sufficient for our maintenance as a species ;
it permits us to subordinate to our ends a sufficient
number of the elements of Reality to enable us to
persist ; and, in so far, our representation must be
taken to embody an expression of the relation of
Reality to ourselves which is adequate to our existence,
and which is consequently true.

Nietzsche's contention that " nothing is true "

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 179

may be met with the remark that the mere assertion
of " nothing being true " must necessarily be based
on the belief in a truth — namely, the truth that no-
thing is true. Truth is synonymous with *' Zweck-
massigkeit," with utility as a means of attaining an
end, that end being the maintenance of a species.
We think Nietzsche's proposition quite justifiable
in itself. That which benefits the existence of the
species is necessarily " true '' for that species. But
when Nietzsche reproaches the '' learned atheists and
anti-metaphysicians of to-day '' with a '' metaphy-
sical belief in truth,'' he fails to see that this belief
he necessarily entertains himself also when he for-
mulates the proposition : truth is an instrument in
the struggle for life. This proposition is based on a
belief in its truth. The fact is that no proposition
can be enunciated without a belief in its truth,
without seeking to base it on truth. Truth may be,
and is, an instrument in the struggle for existence.
But is it any the less '* truth " for this reason ?
Nietzsche declares that " truth is synonymous with
' Zweckmassigkeit,' " (appropriateness) and thinks
thereby to have abolished truth ; and he does not
perceive that he is claiming this very proposition
which he formulates, to be justified as — true !

But there is an objection which Professor Rittel-
meyer has made against Nietzsche's theory of know-
ledge which we think based on a misunderstanding.
Professor Rittelmeyer writes :

*' Nietzsche informs us in the psychological exposi-
tion of his position, that that is ' true ' which assures the
most intense feeling of power and safety. But just as
there are ideas whose antithesis would give us a much
greater sense of security and power, and which are
nevertheless held to be true : so does an idea lose its

180 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

capacity to communicate a sense of security and
power in that very moment when it ceases to be con-
sidered as true. Nietzsche has here inverted the
logical succession of psychological procedure. It is
not because an idea communicates to us a sense of
security and power that it is held to be true, but
because such an idea is considered true it gives —
under certain circumstances — a sense of force and
safety.'' ^

It would be interesting to know what ideas they are
" whose antithesis would give us a much greater sense
of security and power, and which are nevertheless held
to be tiue." When Professor Rittelmeyer writes
'* that an idea loses its capacity to communicate a
sense of security and power in that very moment
when it ceases to be considered as true," so is he but
expressing the same idea as Nietzsche. An idea loses
its capacity as an idea when it ceases to be considered
as true ; as '' untrue " it has no longer any value for
the species ; and precisely because it has no further
value in the struggle for existence it has become un-
true. It is not Nietzsche but Professor Rittelmeyer,
who has inverted the logical sequence of psychologi-
cal procedure. The conception of a species deliber-
ately holding ideas which are antagonistic to its
existence is an impossible one. Such a species would
not survive. Our fundamental concepts of know-
ledge have been evolved in the course of our gradual
adaptation to our environment, and represent a
relative equilibrium between us and the outer world ;
this equilibrium could not possibly exist were our
ideas of the outer world false and opposed to all
reality. Professor Rittelmeyer falls here into the

* F. Rittelmeyer : " Friedrich Nietzsche und das Erkenntnis-
problem," p. 96 (Leipzig, 1903).

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 181

same error as Nietzsche, only the critic has magnified
the error. Nietzsche, while declining to recognise the
legitimacy of arguing from our concepts of Reality
to the truth of these concepts, recognised — not very
logically, it would seem — that these concepts are a
means of adding to humanity strength and power,
that they are an indispensable instrument for the
maintenance of the species. Professor Rittelmeyer,
on the other hand, seems to recognise the possibility
of these concepts being antagonistic to the develop-
ment of the species in strength and power. But he
fails to explain to us why, if the antithesis of certain
ideas would give us a greater sense of security and
power than those ideas themselves — why, under
these circumstances, these ideas have come to be
considered as true.

Nietzsche, as the philosopher of the theory of know-
ledge, has endeavoured to reconcile both Schopen-
hauer, on the one hand, and modern biological science,
on the other. Nietzsche's '' Wille zur Macht" is another
expression for Schopenhauer's " Wille zum Leben.''
But on two essential points Nietzsche differs from the
Frankfurt master. He has recognised a complexity in
the world of our internal sensations which Schopen-
hauer failed to recognise. *' Let us,'' wrote Schopen-
hauer, '' reduce the concept of force to the concept of
Will ; it is, in reality, reducing something unknown
to something infinitely better known — what do I say ?
To the only thing which we know immediately and
absolutely." ^ But Nietzsche, in a brilliant analysis
of the Will, has shown it to be something infinitely
complex, something which we are far from knowing
with anything like precision.^ In the second place,

' " Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung/' i. ii6.
Werke/' vii. 28, 29.

8 *«

182 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer, suppresses every-
thing which is not pure Becoming ; and by his
inclusion of the world of ideas within the sphere of
the struggle for existence, by the parallel which he
establishes between the scheme of survival in the
ideological world and that in the biological world,
he differs from his predecessor.

Nietzsche has carried the conception of natural
selection and the survival of the fittest further than
any other theorician of knowledge, and Nietzsche's
theory of knowledge is based on all its points on bio-
logical science. The empiricism of the materialist
school he has carried to an extreme scepticism. But
precisely in this scepticism lies the difference which
separates him, in the domain of the theory of know-
ledge, from the materialist school. For Nietzsche,
in spite of certain contradictions, is essentially a
subjectivist. His penetrating analysis of the concept
of Object, his insistence on the relativity of all
knowledge, the fundamental importance which he
attributes to the subjective factors in the domain
of knowledge, constitute a great advantage over the
doctrine which places the only reality in the outer
world, of which the prodigious activity of our cerebral
structure is but in a sense the reflection.

In this combination of voluntarism and empiric-
ism lies Nietzsche's value as a philosopher of the
theory of knowledge. His conception of the ideo-
logical world as subjected to the same laws of tend-
ency to persist and survival of the fittest as the
biological world, is an essentially fertile conception.
It is one in entire harmony with his whole philosophic
doctrine, which reduces life and all its manifestations
to emanations of the primordial Will of Power. But
it is in fertile apergus and in brilliant flashes of

THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 183

intuition that Nietzsche's theory of knowledge is rich,
rather than in sustained argument and systematic
exposition. Systematic exposition was what Nietz-
sche detested the most of all things ; his theory of
knowledge, like his theory of morals, and his socio-
logical ideas, are so many expressions of his personal-
ity— of a man who is at once a genius and a lover of
paradox, fond of exaggeration, brave, loyal, aggres-
sive, prepared to follow his thought wherever it might
lead him. We have said that it is in his combination
of voluntarism and empiricism that Nietzsche's value
in the history of the theory of knowledge lies ; it is
for those who come after him to develop his thought ;
and if that thought is to be developed with advantage,
it must be on the lines of such a combination.

CHAPTER III

THE MORAL SYSTEMS — MASTERS AND SLAVES

Even as the Will of Power manifests itself in the
domain of abstract theoretical ideas, so does it mani-
fest itself also in the domain of practical ideology.
Just as our theory of knowledge represents an instru-
ment in the struggle for existence, an instrument for
maintaining the species and increasing its power,
so do the various systems of morals in presence
represent the tendencies of various races struggling
both for existence and supremacy. For there is no
such thing as repose ; everything is in a process of
Becoming, and that which remains stationary perishes.
The condition of existence is progress ; immovable-
ness or regression entails decay. Humanity must
increase in strength and beauty — which is strength
under another form — or humanity will not survive.

As a matter of fact the systems of morals in presence
are reducible to two : the system of morals emanating
from the masters, from the superior races ; and the
system emanating from the slaves, from the inferior
races. For the war of classes, in which the materi-
alist school of historians see the cardinal factor in
history, Nietzsche has substituted the war of the
races. The history of the human race, according
to Nietzsche, has been the history of the perpetual
struggle for existence and supremacy between the
masters, or the strong races, and the slaves, or
the weak races. The former — brave, strong, daring,

184

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 185

ferocious, unscrupulous — possess the advantage of
overwhelming physical force ; they are also intelli-
gent, but their intelligence is in harmony with their
physique. They conceive vast syntheses, create
new tables of values, are bold and daring and brave
in rebus psychologibus, just as they are bold and
daring and brave on the field of battle. They like
to tackle the deepest and most dangerous problems,
on the solution of which the existence of humanity
may depend ; they are lovers of psychological
nudity, to use Nietzsche's admirable phrase, who
probe to the bottom of all things, who take a pleasure
in laying sacrilegious hands on all those beliefs most
sacred to mankind. The values which they create
reflect their character. Good is synonymous for them
with brave, with hard, with daring, with intrepidity,
with refinement of taste and culture. On the other
hand, the weak and inferior races, the " slaves " as
Nietzsche contemptuously calls them, are physically
weak, timid and degenerate. They are naturally
obedient, obsequious, fearful of that which is superior
to them. Their intellectual qualities can often be of
a very high order — witness Kant, witness Socrates.
But the intelligence of the slaves reflects also their
physique. We find the theorists and philosophers
of these inferior races essentially timid in their
speculations ; we find them obsessed by the idea of the
moral law, which is purely a creation of the slaves and
the oppressed, and which is designed to protect them
against the aggressions of the masters. Unable to
defend themselves by physical force, these oppressed
races have to have recourse to the imaginary protec-
tion of an all-powerful Being called God. The moral
law is invented as an instrument of combat, as an
instrument for subduing the ruling races, physically

186 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

invincible. The slaves employ an ideological weapon,
since they possess none other. The moral law is the
reflection of the character of the slaves, and repre-
sents their conception of life as opposed to that of the
masters. The characteristics of cowardice, timidity,
obsequiousness — which are the marks of the slaves —
are elevated in the moral law to the rank of virtues,
and become love of one's enemies, obedience to God,
meekness of heart. The covetousness, envy, hatred,
malice, uncharitableness of these degenerate beings,
thirsting after power and yet terrified by their masters,
break forth in the moral law. Christianity is the
great victory of the slaves and the inferior races.
These triumphed thanks to two factors : firstly, a
decay of the superior races brought on by various
concomitant causes ; secondly, thanks to the moral
law embodied in the Christian religion.

'' In the course of a journey through the many more
or less refined and more or less uncultured systems
of morals which have formerly prevailed, or prevail
actually on earth, I discovered several traits always
recurring regularly and bound up one with another,
until at last two fundamental types presented them-
selves to my eyes with a fundamental difference
between them. There are systems of morals belong-
ing to the masters, and systems belonging to the
slaves." ^

The essential difference between these two systems
of morals is due to the racial difference of the two
types with whom they originated. The '' race of the
masters " is but another name for the eugenic race,
anthropologically superior to the brachycephalous or
mesaticephalous types. The characteristics of this
race — bravery, love of danger for its own sake,

Werke/' vii. 239.

1 «<

MORAL SYSTEMwS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 187

hardness, enduring, intrepidity, boldness, love of
conquest and adventure — all these characteristics are
to be found in the morals of the race, which, viewed
from the modern standpoint, from the standpoint of
modem ideas corrupted by Christianity, by science,
by the '' practical reason " of philosophers, is a
profoundly immoral race. The characteristics of the
slaves, on the other hand, are faithfully reflected in
that system of morals which raises sympathy, love,
humility, charity to the rank of virtues. The two
systems of morals are diametrically opposed to each
other.

The aristocratic ideal finds its expression in the
Greek culture of the age of Pericles, in the great
Roman civilisation, in those grand types of humanity
which the Renaissance produced, in Napoleon.
'' Culture and refinement ; the greatness of the soul
which is great by reason of its abundant wealth, which
gives not in order to receive, which does not seek to
elevate itself by reason of its goodness ; extravagance
as type of true virtue, great wealth of personality as
its condition." ^ Such is the type of the aristocrat,
of the master, of the Over-Man, whose motto, which
is one of Nietzsche's most admirable mottoes, is,
*' Live dangerously.''

But the ideal of the Over-Man is not an ideal for
the many. It is given only to the few, to the very
few, to be *' masters of creation and destruction."
The Over-Man is the warrior whose duty and mission
it is to set an ideal before humanity, to create for
humanity a table of values which shall give a value to
life. And in order to do this, the Over-Man must
know life under all its many aspects, he must know
it as evil as well as good. For him, life is as a vast

^ " Werke," xv. 455.

188 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

laboratory ; and, just as only the trained chemist or
the trained biologist is fit to experiment in a chemical
or biological laboratory, so is the Over-Man the
only one to whom the destinies of mankind can safely
be confided.

It is necessary for humanity that it should have an
ideal ; and that ideal can be created only through
suffering and hardship. *' Every elevation of the
human type has, until now, been the work of an
aristocratic society — and thus will it always be — the
work of a society which believes in the necessity of a
hierarchy of rank and values, and which has slavery
necessary under some form or another . . . Certainly
one must not conceive any humanitarian illusions
concerning the origin of an aristocratic society (con-
sequently concerning the origin of every elevation
of the human type). Truth is hard. Let us avow
without fear the manner in which every higher
culture has originated. Men whose nature was still
natural, barbarians in the most terrible sense of the
word, human beasts of prey, in possession still of
unbroken Will Power and lusts, flung themselves on
weaker, more moral, more peaceful races, which were
perhaps industrial or agricultural ; or else on old,
deca3dng civilisations, in which the last gleams of life
still shone forth in a brilliant glow of mingled intellect
and corruption. The aristocratic caste was in the
beginning always the barbaric caste. Its strength
lay as much in its spiritual as in its physical capacities
— its members were the most complete individuals." ^

Every great thing in the history of humanity
has been the work, not of humanity itself, but of
an elite^ of an aristocratic elite above humanity.
Every invention which ministers to our comfort,

* " Werke," vii. 235-236.

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 189

every discovery which adds to our stock of knowledge,
every creation which adds to our table of values, we
may trace back to some single name. Our modern
science is the creation of Thales, Anaximander,
Heraclitus and Pythagoras, of Copernicus, Keppler,
Newton, Bruno and Gutemberg ; of Darwin, Spencer,
Haeckel, Pasteur, Virchow, Koch and Curie. The
religions of the West are associated with the genius
of a Mahomet, of a Paul, of a Calvin. The names of
iEschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Wagner,
represent so many glories of humanity — glories which
are above humanity and which justify humanity.
It is the mass of humanity which is justified by the
existence of the Over-Man, who creates new values
and thus adds to the power of the race. It is just
and it is necessary that humanity should also be made
to suffer for the Over-Man, since without the latter,
creator of the values which justify humanity's exist-
ence, and set an ideal before the world, humanity
would not even be justified. This is precisely what
the moral system of the masters recognised. It
recognised that every elevation of the human race
was due to the action of an elite ; that the
elite, composed of creators, must be hard towards
itself and towards others. For the creator is hard,
and without hardness he cannot create ; and, if he
cannot create, what becomes of humanity ?

For some time past, however — indeed during the
nineteen Christian centuries — every effort has been
made to suppress the superior races and their ideal.
For the superior races are, it must be recognised, a
veritable scourge for humanity. But this scourge
is good, this scourge is necessary, if humanity is to
be rendered more beautiful, if its power is to be
increased. It is by the scourge that humanity is to

190 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

be kept up to the mark ; the creator who moulds the
destinies of the race for thousands of years, as if they
were wax, can do so only provided he be hard,
provided he be able to scourge without mercy, to
purify by fire and sword. Humanity is the great
ground whereon the creator of values may operate.
The anthropologically inferior races, however,
moved by that same Will of Power which pushes
everything that is, to persist and assert itself, have,
since the advent of Christianity, gained the upper
hand and succeeded in almost ehminating the superior
race and its aristocratic ideal. The inferior races are
physiologically weak and degenerate ; their intel-
lectual capacity, as we have said, is sometimes of a
very high order, but reflects their physiological
nature. Their triumph is due to various concomitant
causes — the neglect by the superior races of biological
laws entering into play at least as much as the
patience, ruse and refined trickery of their
adversaries. Christianity has been the greatest in-
strument in the victory of the slaves. Christianity
had to deal with an epoch peculiarly suited to the
propagation of its doctrines. The Roman Empire was
fast decaying. While the governing races were
wasting their strength and their opportunities in
frivolous amusement, the lower classes were sunk in
deepest degradation. The ideals of the past — ideals
which had produced a Marius, a Julius Caesar, a
Brutus — were gone, and no new ideals had replaced
them. Incompetence and imbecility now reigned
where strength and power and farsightedness had
reigned before. Amidst this heap of ruins, material
and moral, with the masses thirsting after vengeance
and filled with the lust of conquest, Christianity was
bound to flourish. On the other hand, Christianity

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 191

had to deal with young races, barbaric and beautiful
in their uncontrolled Will of Power, in their exuberant
force, but, as we say, young and lacking backbone.
The conversion of the Germanic races, of the race of
Hermann and Thusnelda, to Christianity, is one of the
most remarkable events of history. Christianity con-
quered these wild and uncouth races by instilling
into them the deadly poison of ''conscience'' and
"sin/' The exuberant vitality of the barbarian, un-
able to manifest itself at the expense of others, mani-
fested itself at the expense of himself. Christianity
admirably adapted its weapons to the peoples it sought
to conquer, just as to this day the Catholic Church
adapts itself to each individual country in which
it takes root. The idea of sacrifice by blood, of the
immolation of a victim, subsequently devoured by
the worshippers, and deprived of its meaning as a
symbol of redemption — which symbol would at first
be incomprehensible to barbarians — such an idea
would appeal to the instincts of cruelty and savagery
of these wild barbaric peoples.

The ideal of the slaves triumphed with Christianity
as it has triumphed with all '' modern ideas." Equality,
liberty, democracy are in the air. Modern ideas have
triumphed in the modern State, as they have
triumphed in modern science. Especially is the cult
of science a democratic, an essentially democratic,
idea. The religion of science, of which we hear so
much, appears at once a religion based on the belief
in Truth, like all religions ; and a utilitarian re-
ligion which ministers to the comfort of all, and on
the progress of which is based the hope that every-
body may some day possess '' seven acres and a cow."
The erudite bookworm, the true representative of
science, is the diametrical opposite of the genius, of

192 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

the creator, of the really great man. The age of
decline in the history of a people is the age of
the supremacy of the savant, as opposed to the
synthetic philosopher who creates and beautifies life.
To-day the savant is revered. It is the result of
scientific progress, and is a sign, one of many, of
the degeneracy which characterises the whole fabric
of modern civilisation.

For the modern man is afilicted with degeneracy,
with a profound degeneracy, a degeneracy mani-
festing itself in all modern ideas. There seems to be
an end to the creative genius of the human race, an
end to the life in beauty, in force, in power ; such
as the Greeks and the Romans had manifested. The
man of great passions, of deadly passions, the adven-
turer who sails boldly along unknown seas, amidst all
sorts of hidden perils, in search of unknown lands, this
man is to-day looked askance at, nay, persecuted and
reviled. There is a general belittlement of the race in
progress. The aim of the modern State, of modern
science, of everything modern, is the greatest happi-
ness of the greatest number, the most vile ideal ever
presented to man. As if happiness, or peace of mind,
or placid self-satisfaction could constitute an ideal !
What is needed is the establishment of a new ideal,
which shall revive that waning vitality which bids fair
to vanish altogether in a short time. And that ideal
can only be established through war and bloodshed
and suffering and tears, for only by these means can
humanity be awakened from its insensate dream of
peace and placidity, only by these means can a
robust, healthy, vigorous race — a race of commanders
— be formed.

'' The disease of the Will prevails all over Europe,
but in unequal distribution ; it manifests itself most

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 193

acutely in those countries where culture has been
longest introduced ; and it disappears in the measure
that the ' barbarian/ smothered under the pitiable
coating of Western education, succeeds in enforcing
his rights. In modern France we see the disease
in its most acute form. . . . The strength to will
something is somewhat stronger in Germany, stronger
in northern than in central Germany ; much stronger
in England, Spain and Corsica, here connected with
phlegma, there with a hard skull ; not to speak of
Italy, which is too young to know what it wants, and
which has still to prove that it can will what it wants.
But the strength of Will is strongest of all and most
astonishing of all in that immense Middle Empire,
where Europe joins Asia, in Russia — there the strength
of Will has long been prevented from manifesting itself,
there waits the Will, uncertain as to whether it will
be affirmative or negative — it waits, menacing, until
its explosion. . . . Probably it will not be Indian
wars or complications in Asia which will be necessary
to relieve Europe of its greatest danger, but rather
internal revolution, the splitting of the Empire into
particles, and especially the introduction of that
roaring cataract of nonsense known as Parliamentar-
ianism, including the duty of everyone to read his
newspaper at breakfast-time. I do not prophesy this
as a friend of the revolution. It is the diametrical
opposite which would appeal sooner to my heart — •
I mean such an increase of the Russian danger, that
Europe be at length forced to become dangerous her-
self, that Europe be at length forced to develop a will
in the person of a new governing caste ; a strong,
terribly enduring will, capable of creating for itself
aims to be realised a thousand years hence/' ^

^" Werke/'vii. 154^.

N

194 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Unfortunately Nietzsche's wish does not seem to be
destined to fulfil itself. It is a combination of Far
Eastern complications and internal revolution which
have, for the present at any rate, destroyed the
'* Russian danger/'

To-day the evaluations of the slaves, of the inferior
races, are everywhere triumphant. The democratic
movement, and its consequences, socialism and
anarchism, are the logical result of this victory.
All men are proclaimed equal, in defiance of all
biological law. The aim of life is no longer the
creation of a race of Over-Men, but the giving of
happiness — of a small, fiat, uninteresting happiness —
to everyone. The value of life has been reduced to
a question of pounds, shillings and pence. Suffering
is to be abolished, in accordance with the absurd
sentimentalism of to-day which results from a de-
generate physique, and which is but another name
for abject cowardice. The happiness of the greater
number and the happiness of the smaller number, of
the elite, are two absolutely opposed states. The
happiness of the greater number signifies a happiness
of mediocrity ; no desire for adventure, instinctive
dislike of danger, hatred of anything approaching
to hard work, calm, quiet, a well-ordered, methodical
life, with sufficient to eat and drink, a newspaper
every morning and a bit of green country in the
summer. Such is the ideal of the democracy. And
that ideal has been enforced to such an extent that
the strong men of to-day, supposing such men to exist
in this age of mediocrity, are killed by the atmos-
phere of their environment. The strong, the rich, are
rendered ashamed of their strength and riches. The
venom of '' S3^mpathy " poisons them, that sympathy
which destroys the happiness of the strong without

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 19.'

relieving the weak of any of their abject hideous-
ness.

The sole chance for the strong man of to-day,
who wishes to preserve his dignity and courage and
independence, is solitude. '' Flee, my friend, into
thy solitude,'' counsels Zarathustra. '' I see thee
deafened by the noise of their great men and stung
by the stings of their smaller ones. . . .

*' The people have little understanding for the really
great, for that which creates. But it has understand-
ing for all the players and actors of great things.

'' The world revolves around the creators of new
values ; it revolves invisibly. But the people and
the glory revolve around the comedians. Thus
' goes the world.' " ^

See one result of this great democratic movement
— the growth of demagogy and the evolution of the
professional politician who trades on the credulity of
the imbecile, credulity to which universal suffrage
gives a prime. See the results of this democratic
progress in France — the France of former days, of
chivalry and heroism and great faith, the France
which produced Napoleon, become the France of
the third Republic, of Panama, of the Jews. See
Germany, what has become of that idealism of which
the land of Gretchen was once so proud ? What is the
result of the *' empire " founded on universal suffrage
and parliamentarianism and concession to the masses ?
The result has been a degeneracy of the German in-
tellect. And some of the most brilliant pages of
Nietzsche are those which he devotes to a scathing
criticism of the modern German mind, a mixture of
absurd nationalism and contemptible obsequiousness.

For Nietzsche is no patriot. The Over-Man

Werke,*' vi. yz*

\ f*

196 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

necessarily considers patriotism as appertaining to
the arsenal of worn-out superstitions, like the various
religions. Nietzsche is a " good European," as he
himself expresses it. He joins, on the common
ground of internationalism, all those free minds and
independent thinkers who, like him, are outside the
pale of modernity. But he is nothing less than an
internationalist after the socialist pattern. On the
contrary, if one thing could justify the '' policy of
little States and national exclusivism," as he calls it,
it is war. He predicts for the twentieth century an
era of great wars, the most terrible which mankind
has witnessed in modern times. And, to judge by the
actual state of Europe, Nietzsche's prophecy appears
not unlikely to be realised. But the result of these
wars will be the establishment precisely of that new
governing caste, which Nietzsche looks up to as the
only possible saviour of humanity. Such a governing
caste, composed of men habituated to command and
to rule, will give Europe a new aim and a new ideal,
which will be far above the petty aims and ideals
of present-day nationalism.

The whole doctrine of the masters is contained in the
proposition that " Humanity, as a mass, sacrificed
for the benefit of a single race of strong men, that is
what would constitute a progress.'' Humanity exists
for the benefit of the superior race, of the elite,
and this is a doctrine which Nietzsche did not invent,
and which was also the doctrine of Ernest Renan and
of Gustave Flaubert. All the sufferings, all the
miseries of humanity are necessary, are justified, in
order to permit of the " Dialogues Philosophiques "
or '' La Tentation de Saint- Antoine " or the poem of
Zarathustra being handed down to posterity. And
what does Nietzsche mean by a race of strong men ?

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 197

As we have seen, he means by '' strong man '' the
most complete man — the man of great physical
strength and intrepidity, the man of dangerous
passions, the man of instinctive refinement and
dehcacy even in psychological matters, the man who,
capable of great passions, is capable also of governing
himself. The theories of Nietzsche on the question
of races and their anthropological merits are those
of the Comte de Gobineau and of the modern anthropo-
sociological school, of which Professor Ammon in
Germany, and M. Vacher de Lapouge in France, are
the most eminent representatives. '' In the whole of
Europe,'' writes Nietzsche, " the inferior race has now
triumphed, in regard alike to their colour, to their
brachycephalous features, and perhaps even in regard
to their intellectual and social instincts. . . . The
race of the masters and conquerors is decaying even
in a physiological sense.'' ^

The modern man is ill, and his illness is due to his
degeneracy. The inferior races, naturally weak, puny,
thirsting for vengeance on those who trample on
them, and yet unable to gratify their lust except by
tortuous means — these races are possessed of brutal
passions and vile instincts which they are unable to
repress by their own force. This is why the religions
have been invented, alike as a comfort for the mis-
begotten types of humanity and as a means of render-
ing social life among these inferior races possible.
Thus the priest plays a role of essential import-
ance. The priest himself belongs to the inferior race,
he is himself a degenerate in mind and body, but he
possesses an unrivalled knowledge of the weaknesses
and failings of those amongst whom he works and
lives. The invention of '' conscience " and of the

^ Werke, vii. 418.

198 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

notion of sin are priestly inventions, and admirably
adapted to the end in view. Thanks to these notions,
the evil instincts of the slaves are not prevented from
breaking loose, but they are perverted in their direc-
tion ; instead of being directed against others, these
instincts are directed against self.

What is to be feared, and very greatly feared, under
the present regime of democracy and liberty and
equality, is that those lucky exceptions of humanity,
those who have remained strong and powerful and
healthy, should be subjected to a process of auto-
suppression by means of the religion of sympathy and
human suffering now in vogue, and which reflects
exactly the degeneracy of virile instinct and manly
sentiment which characterises our modern civilisation.
*' The more illness ^ spreads among the human race —
and we cannot deny the spread of the epidemic — the
more greatly should we honour those rare exceptions
of bodily and mental power realised by the lucky
specimens of the race, the more carefully should we
preserve these healthy and strong exceptions from
that worst of all atmospheres — the atmosphere of the
invalid. Is this at present the case ? The invalids
present the greatest danger for those that are healthy ;
not the strongest are the cause of the bad luck of the
strong, but the weakest are the cause of their mis-
fortunes. Is this recognised ? In general it is not
the sentiment of the fear oj man which one would like
to see diminished in intensity ; for this consciousness
of the fear they inspire compels the strong to remain
strong and to become, when occasion requires it,
terrible — this sentiment is the means of maintaining
the healthy type of man. That which should

* Illness must be taken here as synonymous with physiological
degeneracy.

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 199

terrify us, that which is more fatal than any other
fatahty, is not the sentiment of fear, but the senti-
ment of great disgust of man and of great sympathy
for man. Suppose these two sentiments to be com-
bined one day, and inevitably the most disastrous of
calamities must ensue — namely, the ' last will ' of
man, the Will of the Nirvana, nihilism. ... All these
are men of resentment, these physiological mon-
strosities, a whole kingdom shivering with the
hidden desire of vengeance, insatiable and inex-
haustible in outbreaks of fury against the lucky ones
and in masquerades of revenge, in pretexts for
revenge ; when would these attain the final, the most
sublime triumph which their thirst for vengeance
longs for ? Incontestably on the day that they
succeed in burdening the conscience of the lucky ones
with their own miseries, with the miseries of the whole
world, so that the strong and powerful begin to feel
ashamed of their luck and to say perhaps one to
another : ' It is a crime to be so happy ! For there
is too much misery around us ! ' But no greater
or more fatal misfortune could happen than if the
strong and powerful and healthy in mind and
body should begin to doubt of their right to he happy.
Away with this misbegotten world ! Away with
this scandalous feminising of every manly sentiment !
That those who are sick and degenerate do not
communicate their illness and degeneracy to those
that are healthy — this should surely be the first
consideration on earth. But in order to prevent such
an infection, it is necessary that those who are healthy
should separate themselves as far as possible from
those that are sick, should take care not even to look
upon these latter. ... Is it the duty of those who
are healthy and strong and powerful to become doctors

200 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

or nurses ? No, they could not misapprehend their
duty more fundamentally — that which is higher should
not degrade itself into becoming a tool of that which
is lower, the pathos of rank and distance must for all
eternity differentiate the duties of both. . . . And
therefore fresh air ! Fresh air ! And away, far away
from all these asylums and hospitals of modern
civilisation ! And seek good company, seek our
company ! Or else solitude, if it be necessary.
But away at all events from the bad odours of cor-
ruption and concealed malady ! (Aber weg jedenfalls
von den iiblen Diinsten der inwendigen Verderbniss
und des heimlichen Kranken-Wurmfrasses ! ") ^

The profound malady which afflicts modern society
is expressed by that religion of human suffering, of
which Tolstoi is the best -known exponent. This
religion reveals a disgust and weariness of life on the
part of those who adhere to it ; being themselves
weak and puny, being themselves victims of what
they call social injustice, they have a horror of life,
they seek to belittle life, to reduce its vitality. It is,
according to them, only when we take consciousness
of the enormous amount of suffering in the world,
when we come to recognise our solidarity in and
through suffering, that we realise what life really is
— a trial which God compels us to submit to in order
to try us. For Nietzsche, too, suffering is an ordeal
through which each one of us must go if we wish to
do something really great. No one has recognised
more fully than Nietzsche the necessity of suffering,
the beauty of suffering. But Nietzsche, precisely
because he recognises this necessary and beautiful
side of suffering, is a bitter enemy of every doctrine
which favours even the slightest mitigation of it.

^ " Werke," vii. 432 /^.

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 201

The religion of human suffering, Uke sociaHsm, Hke
anarchism, hke the democratic ideal, seeks, on the
other hand, to abolish suffering, or at all events to
reduce it to its lowest minimum possible. This
doctrine — for democracy, socialism, anarchism, Tol-
stoism, and all similar creeds form but one doctrine
in their essential points — has taken its rise — that is
self-evident — among a race weak in vitality, physio-
logically degenerate, for whom life is not worth living,
or at any rate not worth suffering for, not worth
dying for. The minimum of vitality ; such is the aim
and ideal of these socialists, pacifists, arbitrationists,
and other utopists whose growth is cultivated by the
modern State. And those who preach the minimum
of vitality — that is to say, the great majority of
Europeans to-day — preach it because they themselves
suffer from a deficient vitality. The strong man, the
complete man, to use Nietzsche's phrase, desires
precisely the contrary — namely, the integral life,
the maximum of vitality, because he is full of life,
exuberant life, which only waits to be expanded and
to explode. And if it be objected that the minimum
of vitality as the aim of a race is in contradiction with
the law of life which incites us to realise the maximum
of vitality, so may the following reply be made : the
minimum of vitality as the aim of life is a symptom
of degeneracy and decay, and is the invariable
accompaniment of every old and over-ripe civilisa-
tion which is drawing to its close. When the human
species was still in its infancy, dependent for its ex-
istence on the caprices of Nature, wild and unchecked,
the maximum of vitality was absolutely indispensable
for the immediate maintenance of the species.
Surrounded by foes on all sides, the primitive human
being was compelled by the exigencies of his situation

202 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

to act vigorously and promptly. Necessity, as has
been well said, is always the mother of invention.
But as civilisation advanced, as the forces of nature
became more and more subdued by man — as man's
power over his surroundings increased ever more and
more — so has gradually the need of the maximum of
vitality been lost sight of, in the measure that man's
situation in nature has become consolidated. There
is no doubt that modern science has contributed very
largely to this diminution of vitality in the species.
The inventions and discoveries of science, by giving
us an ever-greater sense of security and power, by
ministering in a thousand ways to our comforts,
by relieving us of the necessity of doing a thousand
things for ourselves, by transforming our daily life
more and more into a vast mechanism — these dis-
coveries have made us indolent and nonchalant,
where they have not destroyed the beauty and the
poetry of the real life, which is the dangerous life.
In these days of scientific progress, the dangerous life
seems to us to be void of meaning. The whole aim
and object of science, in its theoretical as well as
in its practical domain, is to render life less dangerous,
to relieve us of as much work as possible, to enable us
to live comfortably, in all security, in a sort of dolce
far niente.

Such, undoubtedly, we say, is the tendency of
modern science ; and thus science presents a double
danger. It destroys the poetry and the beauty of life,
the mercantilism and industrialism which it has
suscitated is the deadly enemy of that idealism in the
best sense of the word, which is the eternal fountain
of the life in beauty. And it has incontestably
fostered the growth of all the unhealthy plants of our
modern culture — of democracy, socialism, anarchism,

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 203

pacificism and the rest. All those who partake of
the democratic banquet under its numerous forms are
also worshippers of the god of science. It is in the
name of science that the gospel of emancipation, of
humanitarianism, and other anti-natural doctrines,
are preached. Every democracy is fundamentally
hostile to the Church, because the Church recognises
a hierarchy, because the Church knows the value of
the ''pathos of rank and distance,'' and because our
sturdy democrats of to-day will have neither God nor
master. The attack on the Church with which every
democracy begins, the hostility to the Church
manifested in every socialist programme, is but a
means to an end. Science is the new deity to which
appeal is made ; and it is in the name of science
that the doctrines of the Rights of Man and other
absurdities are promulgated.

But the universal sympathy which the religion of
human suffering preaches, as well as being a mani-
festation of profound physiological degeneracy, is
also an aggravation of that degeneracy. Sympathy
is but the conveyance of one man's sufferings to an-
other ; for if we sympathise, it is because we suffer
with the victim of an injustice or of his own weakness ;
we suffer, equally with him, from the evil he alleges
himself to be a victim of ; and precisely it is this
sentiment of suffering with the victim ('' Mitleid ")
which constitutes sympathy. But the Over-Man is
also filled with sympathy at the sight — ^not of the
suffering of the human race, but of its degeneracy,
of its belittlement.

*' Hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudaemon-
ism ; all these manners of thinking, which seek to
measure the value of things according to the amount
of joy or suffering which they cause — that is to say.

204 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

according to secondary and inferior measures — are
the fruit of superficial and naive judgment, which
everyone with an artistic soul and creative power
must look down on with irony and pity. Pity for you !
But this is certainly not pity as you understand it :
it is not sympathy with social suffering, nor with the
victims and invalids of society, nor with those who,
vicious and vanquished from the beginning, are
strewn all around us ; still less is it S3^mpathy with
those discontented, oppressed and revolted classes
of society who thirst after power — which they call
* freedom/ Our sympathy is a higher and more
far-sighted sympathy ; we see the race homo
sapiens becoming smaller and smaller, and becom-
ing smaller through your efforts ; and there are
moments in which we contemplate with indescribable
anxiety the results of your sympathy, in which we seek
to defend ourselves against 3^our sympathy, in which
we find your seriousness more perilous than any
light-heartedness. You wish if possible — and what
" if possible '' was ever more insane ? — to abolish
suffering. And we ? It seems that we desire it
intensified beyond what it ever has been ! Comfort,
as you understand it, that is no aim, it is the end of
all things ! A state of things which renders man
absurd and contemptible, that makes his disappear-
ance seem desirable ! It is in the school of suffering
— of intense suffering — that has been created every
great thing which humanity has produced. This
tension of the soul which stiffens itself under the load
of misfortune, and thus learns to become strong ;
this shudder which seizes it in the face of a great
catastrophe ; its ingenuity and courage in supporting,
interpreting, utilising misfortune ; and everything
which the soul possesses of deepness, mystery,

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 205

dissimulation, wisdom, ruse, greatness : is not all
this acquired in the school of suffering, modelled and
cast by great suffering ? Your pity goes out to the
creator, to him who must be hardened, broken, torn,
purified by fire and sw^ord, to him who must of
necessity suffer, who is made to suffer ! And our pity
— do you not understand to whom it goes forth,
when it seeks to defend itself against your pity, as
against the worst of all weaknesses and cowardices ?
Thus it is pity against pity ! " ^

He who loves life wishes life to be as complete as
possible, he wishes for life in all its integrity, suffering
as well as joy, suffering as a means of joy. The
democrat, the socialist, the anarchist, who preach
peace on earth and good- will to men, who believe in the
realisation of an era in which all men shall be brothers,
in which work will be reduced to a minimum, in which
suffering will be unknown, from which all danger, all
adventure, shall be banished — these utopists are the
great haters of life. They sigh for the life of repose,
for the life of mediocrity and honesty, for the life
which shall be no better than a long suicide. Life
is not worth fighting for, not worth suffering for, not
worth confronting perils and adventures for ; life is
recognised as the greatest evil of all, as Schopenhauer
expressed it. Behold the prospect of the future
opened out to us by the progress of democracy :

'* Behold ! said Zarathustra, I show you the last
man.

" ' What is love ? What is creation ? What is
desire ? What is the star ? ' Thus questions the
last man, and he winks.

*' The earth has become small, and on its surface
hops the last man, who belittles everything. His race
^ " Werke," vii. 180-181.

206 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

is indestructible, like that of the flea ; the last man
lives the longest.

*' ' We have discovered happiness ' ; thus say the
last men, and thev wink.

" They have abandoned those countries where life
is hard ; for one has need of heat. One likes one's
neighbour and one rubs oneself against him ; for one
needs heat.

'' To fall ill or to be suspicious is for them a sin :
one walks with infinite precautions. He who stumbles
against the stones or against his fellow-men is mad.

'' A little poison from time to time : that causes one
to dream well. And a lot of poison to finish with,
in order to die pleasantly.

'' One works still, for work is a distraction. But one
takes care that this distraction does not become an
effort.

'' They have abolished poverty and wealth ; each
causes too much worry. Who wishes still to com-
mand ? And who would obey ! Both commanding
and obeying cause too much worry.

'' No shepherd and one single flock ! Everyone
desires the same thing. All are equal : whoever
ventures to think differently goes of his own free will
into a lunatic asylum. . . .

'' ' We have discovered happiness,' thus say the
last men, and they wink." *

As opposed to this ideal of the democracy, Nietzsche
preaches the Over-Man. "Slavery," he writes, ''is
a necessary condition of every true civilisation."
Nietzsche desires the systematic cultivation of a race
of masters, similar to that of the patricians in Rome
and of the '' aristoi " in Athens. He desires the
re -establishment of the system of castes, rigidly separ-

^ Werke, vi. 19, 20.

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 207

ated one from another, with just sufficient connection
between them to enable a renewal of the race to take
place periodically. The sufferings and toils of hum-
anity are necessary in order to permit of the existence
of a few creators, supreme masters of the destinies of
mankind, sublime Olympian artists who constitute
the justification of humanity. The progress of
civilisation has not for its aim the emancipation of the
masses. Nietzsche will not hear of such a thing as
an '' Arbeit erf rage," and is even prepared to denounce
Prince Bismarck himself as a democrat and a socialist,
because of his social legislation. Modern civilisation,
which pretends to progress by emancipating the
masses, and which considers every fresh concession to
the most discontented sections of the populace as a step
forward in the ''onward march of progress '' — this piti-
able modern civilisation of ours is but a caricature of a
civilisation. The real progress of civilisation will be
realised first then, when the aim of the State will be
the cultivation of a superior race. The State which
devotes itself to this object will be a real State — that
is to say, one wielding authority and able to command.
The real interests of civilisation demand the existence
of a vast, confused mass of humanity which shall serve
as the instrument whereby the race of the elites
of the masters, may be cultivated.

The difference in the moral systems of the masters
and of the slaves lies thus primordially in the differ-
ence between the physiological constitution of these
two types. The masters, physiologically strong and
robust, have a system of morals in harmony with the
character of the race. The slaves, physiologically
weak and degenerate, have likewise a system in
harmony with their character, and which is conse-
quently diametrically opposed to the system of the

208 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

masters. The masters are those creators and Olym-
pian artists who create their own values and give, in the
plenitude of their power, a meaning and a sense to life.
For them, everything is sanctioned by their force,
creative and destructive. Good is synonymous with
brave, powerful, beautiful, intrepid, refined, deli-
cate (this understood inter pares), ferocious, hard,
cruel. The masters know no sympathy. They are
essentially hard, and desire life in all its plenitude,
adventurous, dangerous, mysterious. Otherwise with
the slaves. The slaves suffer from a lack of vitality,
consequently they desire life as peaceful, as comfort-
able, as mediocre as possible. Lacking physical force
and the spirit of resource, they love solidarity, because
they need it, because it is their only weapon of defence,
because only by the force of numbers can they hope
to repel the strong man, because it is necessary to
their existence. Solidarity — that is the secret of all
these inferior types of humanity, huddling themselves
together in order to keep warm, living miserably
because they cannot afford to live otherwise, sharing
the same malignant hatred and envy of all that is
strong, of all that is beautiful, of all that which is
superior to them. The doctrines of nihilism which
they put forth, cloaked under the names of good-
ness, sympathy, peacefulness, "eternal life," ''the
kingdom of heaven," are all of them doctrines of the
decline of life. He whose vitality is in the ascendant
loves war and danger and adventure and mystery;
he is ready, nay, glad, to face any amount of suffering
in order to attain his end ; he is the man of great
passions, who knows not what moderation means, for
whom life is, to use Nietzsche's beautiful definition,
*' a means of experience." He, on the other hand,
whose vitality is insufficient and declining will

MORAL SYSTEMS- MASTERS AND SLAVES 209

naturally have no reason to love life, to wish for life
ever more arduous, ever more powerful. He has every
reason to wish for a " comfortable " life, for a life of
ease and dolce far niente. But the inferior type,
the slave, is filled with envy of that which is strong
and beautiful and happy ; envy and hatred are not
propitious to the '' peace of mind " preached by
Christianity, that gospel of inferiority par excel-
lence. Thus the slaves seek to destroy that which
is strong and beautiful by bringing it down to their
own level. This they have succeeded in doing,
thanks to the moral law, to the Christian religion,
to the insidious venom of sympathy and charity, and
thanks also to their having infected the superior races
with their doctrine of solidarity — which has nothing
in common with the solidarity inter pares some-
times practised and always felt by the masters.
However decadent Europe may be to-day — and this
decadence translates itself in every one of our modern
ideas — Nietzsche has by no means lost hope. On the
contrary, decadence may be necessary in order to en-
gender the race of the future, the race of commanders,
of the Over-Man. Perhaps that which we ought to
wish for is an increase of degeneracy, an increase of
rate in the process of belittling the modern man.
The race of the future, of the Over-Man, may very
likely be engendered by a sort of auto-suppression,
by the disgust awakened by the spectacle of the decay
of humanity. The great disgust of man may be a
sentiment of great fertility, capable of giving birth to
a movement in favour of the systematic cultivation
of a higher race, of a race which shall overthrow the
present table of moral evaluations and substitute for
it the new evaluation — that of the masters. The new
values of the masters will regenerate humanity, will

210 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

give humanity an ideal, an aim, a value. Nietzsche
is encouraged by the spectacle of Napoleon, that
" great continuator of the Renaissance," to whom
Europe has owed all its hopes and all its aspirations
towards a higher state of things during the last
century. " It is thanks to Napoleon (and not at all
to the French Revolution, which brought forth no-
thing but ' fraternity ' between nations and other
absurd sentimentalism) that a couple of warlike
centuries are now about to begin — centuries which
have no equal in history ; thanks to him that we
have now entered into the period of classical warfare,
of scientific, and at the same time popular, warfare on
a large scale, which coming ages will look back on with
envy and veneration as a Great Era. ... It will be
thus owing to Napoleon that the man in Europe will
have triumphed at last over the Philistine and the
merchant. . . . Napoleon, who in all modern ideas,
and especially in our civilisation, saw something like
a personal foe, proclaimed himself by this enmity to
be the greatest continuator of the Renaissance ; he
has resurrected for us a complete piece of ancient art,
the most important perhaps — a piece of granite.'' ^

Nietzsche sees in cruelty one of the noblest passions
of the human soul. For it is the passion which incites
us to seek ever more and more knowledge, than which
nothing is more dangerous, nothing more apt to cause
us suffering and disillusionment. *' And knowledge
itself ! It may be for others something different, for
instance a couch of repose, or a means of conversation,
or a theme for musing idly — for me it represents a
world of danger and triumphs, in which all the heroic
sentiments have their place. ' Life as a means of
experience ' — with this principle ever before one's

' " Werke," v. 313.

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 211

mind's eye one can live not only with courage, but
one can live joyfully and laugh joyfully." ^ And
what have our modern ideas made of this search after
knowledge, which for the intrepid thinker is a search
amidst virgin forests, or amidst unknown seas, a
means of adventure which tempts his love of unknown
perils and surprises ? We have the so-called " theory
of knowledge " erected into a science. Knowledge is
removed from the domain of practical life, with all its
joys and woes, and hopes and fears, and transferred
to the glacial region of abstract reasoning. An
abstract '' desire of truth,'' an abstract '' desire not
to be deceived," are substituted for the love of adven-
ture and perilous risk as the motives for our search
after knowledge. The cowardice prevalent to-day,
in the face of that which is unknown, the desire to
avoid all risks, all unpleasant surprises, is well
illustrated by the development of the Agnostic theory
of life, which seeks to hide the truth from our eyes
behind the veil of the Unknowable. This meta-
physical entity is a convenient screen with which to
conceal that which we do not want to know, that
which we are afraid to know. It enables us to postulate
at least the possibility of a supranatural sanction for
life ; and with many persons this possibility is
equivalent to a probability, if not to a certainty.
Taking it as a whole, the moral system of the
inferior races, of the slaves, is a cowardly system. It
is a system which proclaims life to be an evil, which
pronounces life to be worth neither great efforts nor
great dangers. It is too cowardly to put into practice
the act to which its arguments all seem logically to
lead — the act of suicide. It prefers less dangerous
means, such as ascetic practices and the suppression

' " Werke," v. 245.

212 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

of all violence. The system of morals which triumphed
with Christianity is a system which reduces life to a
hemiplegic condition. It suppresses precisely that
side of life which alone possesses value, which alone
justifies life. The most consistent adepts of this
system of morals are undoubtedly the socialists,
*' that most logical and also most pernicious race
of men/' as Nietzsche calls them. Nietzsche has
socialism in abhorrence. Even as an organism is
incapable of living without a head, so is a society
incapable of living without chiefs to command it and
lead it. The dogma of the equality of all men is a
profoundly anti-natural conception ; it is a conception
which, even supposing its realisation to be possible,
would render life hideous by its very monotony.
The beauty of life lies precisely in the exuberant
variety of its types, in the accentuation of individual
contrasts, in the increasing of the distances which
separate the classes of society. Of anarchism,
Nietzsche is an equally convinced adversary. Anar-
chism is synonymous with the rule of the mob, with
the destruction of all art and beauty, with the
drying up of all the sources of human energy and
activity. Anarchism, like socialism, has taken its
rise among the lowest classes of the population,
among the most envious and discontented and mutin-
ous classes. It is an outburst of envy and hatred,
of hatred of all that which is rich and powerful and
lucky and well born. It is essentially a gospel of
the rabble. And yet, it may be urged — it has been
urged notably by M. Fouillee — that Nietzsche is
himself an anarchist. '' At the bottom,'' writes M.
Fouillee, " Nietzsche is himself an anarchist, enemy
of liberty and enemy of equality, an anarchist who
considers that, all moral restraint being abolished.

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 213

the best thing that could happen is for a good tyrant
to make the law. The democratic anarchists, after
having suppressed all moral law, imagined that they
would henceforth be exempt from all obedience ; but
the aristocrat Nietzsche says to them : ' Now, more
than ever, is the time for obedience ; there will
always be slaves, and there will always be masters,
such is the law of nature ; if, as I fear, you cannot
rank among the masters who command, you must
resign yourselves to being among the slaves who
obey/ " ^ Such a view of Nietzsche's position is
admissible ; and yet great restrictions must be
placed on the use of the word anarchist. Anarchism
as understood in the sociological meaning of the term,
and as explained by the most authorised exponents
of philosophic anarchism, Kropotkine, Grave, Malato,
signifies absence of all authority. Now Nietzsche
is, as M. Fouillee rightly says, enemy of all
liberty and equality. He is essentially aristocratic
and autocratic. His social ideal is the exactly
diametrical opposite of the anarchist ideal. Whereas
the creed of anarchism is summed up in the dictum :
'* Neither God nor Master,'' the creed of Nietzsche
affirms the absolute necessity of slavery. Whereas
anarchism implies full and integral liberty, full and
integral equality, Nietzsche is a despot and an auto-
crat, and a despot more rigid than any tsar. Nietz-
sche is opposed to anarchism by all the deepest and
most fundamental sentiments in his nature. His
culture and extreme refinement, his aristocratic tastes
and views, all tended to make him look down with
repugnance on a movement originated by the most
unhappy sections of the proletariat for its emancipa-

^ A. Fouillee : " Nietzsche et rimmoralisme," p. 135 (Paris,
1902).

214 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

tion. He has all the antagonism of an artist for the
rabble, which, from the Olympian heights on which
he soared, he despised. Thus we think it a grave
mistake to call Nietzsche an anarchist. The social
system of Nietzsche — in so far as a social system is to
be deduced from his writings — is an autocracy and
an iron despotism, as far removed from the anarchist
conception of society as the Poles asunder.

The essential about Nietzsche's theorv of morals
^•-^T is that every system of morals is a manifestation of
the Will of Power. Every such system must be re-
duced to its real value, which is that of an instrument
in the struggle for existence. According to Nietzsche
the only morality worth anything is the morality
we have created for ourselves, each one for himself.
But this proposition is subject to restriction. Only
those who are capable of creating values, onh^ the
Over-Man, the Olympian artist and genius, has
the right to create values. Goethe has recognised
the truth of this when he wrote :

*' Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben
Der taglich sie erobem muss."

^ Zarathustra insists particularly on this point.
He is not indulgent for those mediocrities who,
swollen with vanity, arrogate to themselves a privilege
belonging only to the chosen few of the elite.

'' Art thou a new force and a new law ? A first
impulsion ? A wheel able to turn itself ? Canst thou
compel the stars to revolve around thee ?

" Alas ! Many are those who are devoured by the
unhealthy desire to raise themselves ! Numerous
are the ambitious which desperately agitate ! Prove
to me that thou be not one of these hungry ones,
devoured by ambition !

MORAL SYSTEMS— MASTERS AND SLAVES 215

" Alas ! Many are the great thoughts which pro-
duce no more than a breath of wind ; they do but
swell and become thereby more empty !

'' Thou cairst thyself free ? But I would fain
know the thought which rules thee, and not the nature
of the yoke from which thou art released.

'' Art thou of the number of those who have a right
to shake off the yoke ? For there are many who
have thrown aside all that which gave them some
value, in shaking off the yoke of servitude/' ^

It is precisely the Over-Man whose duty and
privilege it is to create new values, to give
humanity an ideal and an aim, and to set above it
a new table of laws. It is in order to fulfil this duty
and privilege that the Over-Man is to be engendered.
*' The inferior race,'' says Nietzsche, '' needs a
justification. Its raison-d' etre is that it may serve
the interests of a superior race, who will use it as a
foundation without which it could not accomplish its
task. It will be not only a race of masters, whose
duty it will be to lead and govern the flock, but a race
having its own sphere of life, gifted with an excess of
strength which permits it realising more and more
beauty, more and more courage, more and more
culture and refinement, pushed to the length of a
highly developed spirituality, an affirmative race,
which commands every luxury, strong enough to be
able to reject the tyranny of the categorical imperative,
rich enough to avoid itself from falling into parsi-
mony or pedantism ; a race living far beyond all good
and evil, a hothouse for the cultivation of rare and
strange plants." This race alone it will be who can
create. And he alone who can create, he alone who
can and must daily conquer for himself his own hberty

Werke," vi. 91, 92.

1 **

216 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

and his own right to hve — he alone has the right to his
own morahty. With Nietzsche, anarchistic individu-
ahsm is restricted to the superior race, to the strong
and vigorous and healthy in mind and body. The
Over-Man conquers freedom, not for its own sake
but for the sake of the race ; he conquers freedom,
because only in possession of full and integral freedom
can he create ; only when he is free can he fulfil his
task of setting a value upon humanity. But freedom
is conditional upon this ultimate duty. To all who
aspire to live beyond the domain of good and evil,
Zarathustra poses the question : '' Frei wozu ? '' ^

1 " Free for what ? "

CHAPTER IV

THE OVER-MAN

'' At one time or another/' wrote Nietzsche, " in a
stronger era than this weak, sceptical age of ours, a
redeemer is bound to arise, one who knows the mean-
ing of great love and great contempt, the man with
the soul of a creator ... he whose solitude is mis-
understood by the people, as if it were a flight from
Reality — whereas he does but bury himself ever
deeper in Reality, in order that, when he once more
appears in the light of day, he may draw from this
reality the means for effecting its own redemption, its
redemption from the curse which modern ideals have
set upon it. This man of the future, who shall redeem
us from the modern ideal, and also from all its con-
sequences, from the great disgust, from the desire of
negation, from nihilism, this herald of midday and of
great resolutions, this liberator of the Will, who will
give back to the world its aim and to humanity its
hopes, this Antichrist, and Antinihilist, this vanquisher
of God and the nirvana — he must one day arise.

" But what am I saying ? Enough ! Enough !
for the present but one thing is appropriate for me —
silence ; otherwise I should find myself talking about
things which are allowed only to one younger than
myself, to a 'spirit of the future,' to one stronger
than I am — which are allowed only to Zarathustra,
to Zarathustra the godless ! " ^

* " Werke," vii. 395-396.
217

218 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

The great redeemer of humanity, who shall create
new values for the race, and give back to the world
an ideal worthy of it — this creator of the future is
none other than the *' Over-Man " {" tjbermensch "),
whose advent Zarathustra has come to preach.

Every age, according'- to Nietzsche, has its table of
moral and metaphysical values peculiar to it. In this
present age of ours the prevailing evaluation of moral
values is one which places the qualities of goodness,
love of justice, sympathy, altruism, in the foremost
rank as virtues ; and on the other hand anathe-
matises the opposite qualities of cruelty, hardness,
egoism. But this evaluation, which the majority of
us are accustomed to consider as immutable, has
not always prevailed. Every evaluation of moral
values reflects the character, physiological and
psychological, of its creators. The evaluation of
moral values in an aristocratic age, in an age in which
a few higher beings command the rest of humanity,
whose destinies they control, will be an essentially
aristocratic evaluation. The qualities which the
ruling race possess, and which they consequently hold
in honour, will be counted as the highest virtues ;
such qualities will be those of bodily strength and
beauty, courage, skill, love of adventure and daring,
in the psychological as in other domains, culture and
refinement of taste, intellectual probity and power.
In a democratic age, on the contrary, when such a
superior race no longer exists, or has lost its power,
and when the inferior races are predominant, the
evaluation of moral values will be different, and will
reflect the character of the now predominant race ;
the qualities of this race, those qualities which this
race most greatly honours, will have been trans-
formed into virtues ; the chief virtue will be soHdarity,

THE OVER-MAN 219

as it is in their solidarity and force of numbers that
the strength of this race Ues . Lacking physical qualities
and education, it will despise those qualities of bravery,
love of danger and adventure, skill, which result
from the possession of a good physique. As these
qualities, personified by the stronger races, represent
a danger to the security and existence of the weaker
races, they will further be condemned as '* bad ''
and *' immoral/' All which amounts to saying that
our moral evaluations are the direct corollary of our
physiological constitution. The moral law is not
something apart from ourselves, outside ourselves.
It enters within the sphere of the biological law which
pushes everything that is, to persist and develop.
Our moral evaluations are a means of adjusting
ourselves to our environment. The multitudinous
sensations which penetrate us from outside strike
each of us in various ways. We say ''yes '' to those
sensations which respond to the desires of our nature,
and *' no '' to those which are repugnant to our nature.
We judge the first lot of sensations to be ''good,''
and the second lot to be " bad."

Now a striking fact which we witness at present
in Europe, is the gradual and sure development of a
mediocre type of humanity at the expense of the
superior races. The gregarious animal, living with
and by the herd, has eliminated, or nearly eliminated,
the solitary individual, strong in his solitude. On the
one hand we see a constant growth of morbid characters
as a result of the progress of civilisation, notably an
enormous increase of nervous disease. On the other
hand, we see a steady growth of mediocrity, a growth
fostered alike by the modern State and by modern
science.

This growth of mediocrity and degeneracy is not,

220 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

we have said, a phenomenon to be condemned in
itself. This Nietzsche has expressly recognised.
The growth of mediocrity is an absolutely necessary
condition for the establishment of a superior race, of a
race of masters. History teaches us that the ruling
races have invariably a very limited existence. The
aristocracy of Athens was decayed in two hundred
years, and yet Athens was comparatively peaceful.
The duties of the elite are in themselves of a
nature to destroy that elite within a short period.
Their love of war and adventure, their ambition,
decimate the ranks of the superior races. He who
is strong and powerful, and a lover of life, consumes
his energy without further thought. He spends out
of the overflowing richness of his vitality. He cares
not for a long hfe — for that longevity so extolled by
certain scientists to-day — but what he desires is the
intense life, the integral life, the maximum of life.
Thus the existence of a more peaceful, mediocre and
stable type is necessary in order to ensure the sur-
vival of the human species ; for if the latter were
exclusively composed of the aristocratic and ruling
races it would inevitably die out. Thus the '' slaves/'
the great mass of humanity, mediocre and uninterest-
ing, must exist as a pedestal for the monument of
genius.

But this development of the vast social fabric is a
costly process. It represents an immense exploitation
of human labour. And what is the value of this
exploitation ? What is its aim ? If its aim be merely
the greatest happiness of the greatest number, then
its aim is low, its value is of no account. This gigan-
tic exploitation of human labour, this complicated
social processus, must, in order to be justified, find an
aim which shall give it adequate value. And it can

THE OVER-MAN 221

only attain adequate value if its aim be the creation
of a higher race, of a race of conquerors, of masters
who shall, by their works, give a meaning to humanity.
'' Can we believe that the increase of the costs borne
by every individual will result in an increase of
profit ? The contrary seems true : the individual
costs, added together, produce generally a deficit ;
man finds himself diminished in value, so that one
is at a loss to understand, in the end, the wherefore
of this immense evolution. A wherefore ? A new
wherefore ? That is what humanity most needs.'' ^
This exploitation of humanity which is implied in the
maintenance and development of the social structure,
is justified only if its aim be the creation of beauty,
if its result be the creation of a superior race which
shall set the seal of its own value on humanity and
give to humanity ideals for a thousand years hence.
The State is not an end in itself, any more than
society is an end in itself ; both are justified only as
substructures on which the superstructure of the
Over-Man may found itself. The superior race, the
race of masters, is itself its own justification. It is a
luxury of humanity, representing the profit realised
on the exploitation of human labour concretised in
the social organisation. It is a race of rare and tropi-
cal plants, of Olympian artists in the full sense of the
word, who live in beauty, and create beauty, and
create beauty by their force and power and intrepidity
in all spheres of activity.

Professor Lichtenberger has given the following
definition of the Over-Man : — *'The state which man
will attain when he has renounced the existing
hierarchy of values, and rejected the Christian,
democratic or ascetic ideals which prevail actually in

^ " Werke," xv. 422.

222 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Europe, and when he has returned to the table of
values admitted by the noble races, by the masters,
who create for themselves their own values instead
of receiving them from outside." ^ But the con-
ception of the Over-Man differs from all the philo-
sophical conceptions which have preceded it, in that
it is essentially the philosophy of a class, and of a
very small and limited class. Zarathustra has come
to preach the Over-Man, not to humanity, but to the
chosen few of humanity, to the superior men who are
disgusted with modern ideas and modern civilisation.
Up in his grotto, in the solitude of the mountains,
Zarathustra has collected a number of these superior
men and given them hospitality. Here is the sage
who, pessimistically, sees all around him symptoms
of decay and death, and who preaches : ** All is
vanity.'' Here are two kings, constitutional kings,
who have abandoned their kingdoms because, being
no longer the real chiefs of their subjects, they take
no pleasure in the fiction of royalty. Here is the
modern scientist, the ''objective " thinker, who has
devoted his life to a study of the brain-structure of
the leech. Here is the magician, the professional
politician, who has played every role and deceived
everyone in turn, but who cannot deceive himself
any longer and who seeks in vain a true genius.
Here is the Most Hideous of Men, he who has slain
God, he who represents all the miseries and sufferings
of humanity during its long evolution from the
anthropoid to man ; God has been slain by the sight
of so much hideousness, of so much misery and
wretchedness, for God has had to contemplate this
work of his unceasingly, and he has contemplated it
until he is slain by it. Here is the last of the Popes,
^ " La Philosophic de Nietzsche," p. 149 (Paris, 1904).

THE OVER-MAN 223

unable to console himself for the death of God. Here,
also, is the sceptic, he who has partaken of every
opinion, of every conviction, in turn, only to abandon
each one successively, and at last, disgusted, sceptical,
without faith or hope, he has taken refuge in the
solitude of the mountains with Zarathustra. For
this poor wanderer Zarathustra is filled with pity.
He sees in him the image of his shadow, for Zara-
thustra, too, has known every conviction, has been
tossed about on the stormy sea of life, and knows life
in all it brings of illusion and disappointment and
deception. And he feels the disgust and disappoint-
ment of this wandering soul in distress, and he has for
him some words of profound pity :

'' Thou art my Shadow," he said with sorrow.

*' The danger thou dost confront is not small, O
free spirit, bold traveller ! Thou hast spent a bad
day ; take care that the night be not worse for thee.

'* For wanderers such as thee, a prison itself ends
by seeming a welcome refuge. Hast thou seen how
quietly and peacefully the imprisoned malefactors
sleep ? They sleep peacefully, for they enjoy their
new security.

'* Take care, lest in the end, thou shouldst become
the slave of a narrow belief, of a hard and rigorous
illusion ! Henceforth everything which is narrow
and solid must necessarily prove attractive to thee.

"Thou hast lost thy aim! . . . And thus— hast
thou lost also thy way !

'' Poor wandering soul, poor tired butterfly ! '' ^

All these refugees to whom Zarathustra offers the
hospitality of his mountain grotto are the *' superior
men'* of to-day; they are those ''hard, sceptical
spirits '' who are the honour of our time ; disgusted

Werke/' vi. 398-399.

1 "

224 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

with the growing democratisation of Europe, having
lost their ideals and their faith and their hope, they
are profoundly pessimistic, disgusted with man and
the world, and aspiring to nothing but the nirvana.
Neither material nor ideal satisfactions are henceforth
adequate to them. They are the victims of modern
culture.

But Zarathustra has not come merely to preach
the '' great disgust " of man. He has come to give to
humanity '' the new wherefore " which is necessary
for its continued existence. Zarathustra has come
to preach a new gospel, to give to the world a new aim
and a new ideal. And this new aim and ideal is
symboUsed by the Over-Man.

'' Behold, I show you the Over-Man. Man is
something which must be surpassed. What have you
done to surpass him ?

'' All that which has existed up till now has created
something superior to it ; and do you wish to be the
outgoing tide and to return to the ape rather than
surmount man ?

'' What is the ape to man ? An object of derision
and shame. And thus must also be man an object
of derision and shame for the Over-Man.

'' You have followed the road which leads from
the worm upwards to man ; and much of the worm
has clung to you. Formerly you were apes, and even
now is man more ape-like than any ape. . . .

*' Behold, I show you the Over-Man.

** The Over-Man is the justification of all life.
Your Will it must be that says : let the Over-Man be
the justification of all life." ^

The Over-Man will differ profoundly from the man
of to-day, from the '' modern man," in that he will

' " Werke," vi. 13.

THE OVER-MAN 225

possess in a very high degree all those quahties which
the modern man so conspicuously lacks— will of
power, independence, self-confidence. *' The modern
man," the mediocrity, possesses no individual value ;
his sole value is derived from the collectivity of which
he is a member, from the social organisation of which
he is one of the instruments. The Over-Man, on the
other hand, is essentially a solitary being, loving
solitude, and strong enough to bear solitude, and
strong by reason of his great solitude. The Over-
Man is '' the milestone which marks the degree of
progress attained by humanity at certain epoques," ^
he is the synthesis which resumes all this progress in
himself. The modern man is mediocre, and, because
mediocre, he believes in the equality of all men.
But no dogma is more abhorrent to the Over-Man
than the dogma of equality ; an aristocrat himself,
he believes in the '' pathos of distance " and in the
necessity of a hierarchy of rank and values. The
Over-Man lives essentially inter pares ; his morality
is the morality of a caste ; and he considers him-
self free from any sort of duty or responsibility
towards the inferior masses of humanity. His acts
admit of no comparison ; they are unique and belong
to him alone. '' Reciprocity is the greatest of
vulgarities ; the conviction that something which
I do, cannot and may not be done by others (except
in the most privileged sphere of my equals, inter
pares), that in a deeper sense one never can give
back because one is something which occurs but
once . . . this conviction is the reason of the separa-
tion between the aristocracy and the masses, for the
masses believe in equality, and consequently in
reciprocity." ^ Neither does the Over-Man attempt
' " Werke," xv. 482. ^ Ihid. xv. 458.

226 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

in any way to propagate or to popularise his ideal.
He knows that his code of honour and morality is an
aristocratic code, a code for him and his equals only ;
and that its popularisation among the masses, who
are unable to understand it, would infallibly result in
anarchy. Besides which, the great attraction of his
code — that it is a code for the few, for the privileged,
a mark of distinction which differentiates him from
the mass — would disappear were this code ever to
become *' popular.'' The virtue of the Over-Man is
the '' virtue " of the Renaissance, terrible and fraught
with danger for the masses. Such a virtue is but the
most luxurious and extravagant form of vice, par-
taking of the immorality of all nature, since it is a
virtue in conformity with nature. " It is, in a word,
the most formidable of all vices, if one appreciates
it according to the degree of its nocivity for others." ^
The Over-Man does not regard truth with the
superstitious awe of the rest of mankind. Neither
does he despise truth. But he knows that truth is but
an instrument in the struggle for life, that there is
no such thing as '' truth " in itself, and that truth is
an instrument of power. It is as an instrument of
power that he admires truth, that he seeks to obtain
more and more knowledge ; if life be a means of
acquiring knowledge, knowledge is in turn a means
of acquiring power. Whereas the character of the
lesser type of humanity is complex, great force of
intellect of a certain kind existing side by side with
physiological degeneracy, the character of the Over-
Man is simple. In his every act his superabundant
force and vitality manifest themselves. He possesses
a powerful temperament, he is capable of giving vent
to the strongest passions, and strong enough to give

' " Werke," xv. 450.

THE OVER-MAN 227

vent to them, and strong enough also — the greatest
strength of all — to conquer himself. Both in the
physical and intellectual domain the Over-Man is of
a pugnacious and combative disposition. He needs
the fight in order to persist and develop. The fight
is to him the bread of life. And for this reason,
because the good fight is necessary to his existence,
and because he loathes the '' peace of mind '' recom-
mended by moralists, as the worst of diseases — for
this reason he seeks a good enemy, pugnacious and
obstinate like himself, an enemy of whom he can be
legitimately proud.

And what, then, are the means best adapted to the
cultivation of the Over-Man, of the superior race of the
future ? In the first place, great suffering is necessary.
'* It is in the school of suffering — of intense suffering
— that has been created every great thing which
humanity has produced. This tension of the soul,
which stiffens itself under the load of misfortune, and
thus learns to become strong ; this shudder which
seizes it in the face of a great catastrophe ; its ingenu-
ity and courage in supporting, interpreting, utilising
misfortune ; and everything which the soul possesses
of deepness, mystery, dissimulation, wisdom, ruse,
greatness : is not all this acquired in the school of
suffering, modelled and cast by great suffering ? '*
We have already cited this beautiful passage from
Nietzsche. The creator must be '* hardened, broken,
torn, purified by fire and sword,'' he must " of
necessity suffer." And in order to withstand suffer-
ing, in order to be able to profit by misfortune and not
succumb to it, it is essential that the creator be
hardened, that he be " hard as brass, nobler than
brass." The Over-Man must be disciplined, and
rigidly disciplined. It is in the school of harsh and

228 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

rigid discipline that one learns to command and also
to obey. For if the Over-Man be a commander, if it
be his task to set an aim and an ideal before humanity,
he must also know how to obey. The democratic
doctrine of '' neither God nor master " is to Nietzsche
both abhorrent and anti-natural. He who commands
must also know how to obey, if necessary, and his
authority to command must be based on his capacity
to obey. '' In any case, nothing is more desirable
than that one should be subjected in good time to a
rigid discipline. . . . That which stamps the ' hard
school ' as a good school, and which distinguishes it
from the others, is that much is exacted there, and
severely exacted. At such a school, good work, even
excellent work, is claimed as being normal ; praise is
rare, and indulgence is unknown. Such a school is
necessary from all points of view, for things bodily
and mental, because it is impossible to distinguish
between these. The same discipline it is which
produces both the good soldier and the good professor,
and, all things considered, there is no good professor
but who has within him the instincts of a good soldier.
What is necessary is to know both how to command
and how to obey without cringing ; to be able to
stand in the ranks, and yet be ready at any moment
to assume command ; to prefer danger to safety ;
to be able not to weigh in the balance that which
is permitted and that which is forbidden ; to be a
greater foe of skilfulness, of meanness, and of para-
sitism than of evil. . . . What is the lesson which
one learns in such a school of discipline ? To obey
and to command." ^

And Nietzsche is not soft-hearted for those who
would be his disciples. *' I wish those who interest

' " Werke," xv. 460.

THE OVER-MAN 229

me in one way or another/' he writes, '' I wish
them every suffering, isolation, illness, ill-treatment,
opprobrium. I wish that they may have personal
experience of the deepest self -disgust, of self-torture
and self -defiance, of the great distress of defeat.
I have no pity for them, for I wish them the only
thing which can prove whether or not they possess
any real value : — that they hold good.*' ^

But the Over-Man must not only be able to bear
great suffering ; he must not only have the courage
to seek great suffering and be able to love great
suffering as being that which is noblest on earth ;
he must also be able to inflict great suffering. The
capacity to inflict great suffering without listening
to the cries of the victim is what is really great in a
man's character. " Who can hope to attain anything
great," asks Nietzsche, *' if he does not possess suffi-
cient strength and force of will to be able to inflict
great suffering ? To be able to suffer is the least of
things ; weak women and even slaves can surpass
themselves in that. But not to succumb to a feeling
of distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great
suffering and listens to the shriek of the sufferer —
that is great, that is true greatness." ^

The essence of the Over-Man is, according to
Nietzsche, that he is true to nature. He is a return to
nature. The systems of morals which humanity has
set up one after another are all of them systems con-
trary to nature, which set up a barrier between man
and nature. The great law of life is : '' Live wholly,
live fully," This law the Over-Man realises. Know-
ledge and truth are but instruments which he employs
in order to attain his end quicker and more surely.

'^'Werke/' xv. 461.
^ Ibid. XV. 245.

230 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Truth is, for Nietzsche, an expression of a certain
relation between the cognisant subject and the object
known, which results in an increase of power of the
former over the latter. When the Over-Man seeks
knowledge, he is seeking to increase his power. The
sentiment actuating the Over-Man is alw^ays the
sentiment of the Will of Power. The Over-Man is the
incarnation of the Will of Power under its noblest
aspect. That Will of Power it is which pushes him
to seek for the realisation of life in all its integrity ;
for only in the measure that we can afford to live
fully, to be extravagant and thriftless with our vital
power — only in that measure are we strong and
powerful.

The Over-Man, then, is hard. He is egotistical,
and seeks the integral development of his personality.
He knows neither pity, nor sympathy, nor tender-
heartedness, nor justice. He knows but one law —
and that is his own law, the law of his own force,
a law which is at once its own sanction and its own
delimitation. The great trial which Zarathustra
is compelled to undergo, the trial which shall show
whether indeed Zarathustra is capable of placing
a new table of values before humanity, is the trial of
sympathy. Zarathustra meets, in a vile place where
nothing grows and only serpents are to be found —
he meets there suddenly an object, a repulsive and
awful-looking object, the Most Hideous of Men, he
who represents all the accumulated load of humanity's
sufferings and misfortunes, he who has slain God by
his very hideousness, for even God could not look
with impunity on so much hideousness and misery.
And when he first sees this awful-looking object.
Zarathustia has a moment's hesitation, he endures for
a moment the distress of uncertainty and poignant

THE OVER-MAN 231

anguish, and he falls to the ground. But it is only for
a moment. The combat is swift and deadly, but
Zarathustra is capable of surmounting himself. He
rises again after a minute, his heart steeled against
all pity, and goes on his way. Zarathustra has
vanquished pity ; he has withstood the spectacle of
the Most Hideous of Men, of him whose very hideous-
ness has slain God, and he has emerged stronger than
ever from the ordeal. Pity and sympathy have been
crushed ; and the new table which Zarathustra has
come to place above humanity has been sanctified !
'' Werdet hart ! ''

The sanction of the Over-Man is the doctrine of the
Everlasting Return, which Zarathustra has come to
preach in tones of lyrical solemnity. It was in 1881,
in the forest of Silvaplana, by Sils-Maria, by a glorious
summer sunshine, that the idea of the Everlasting
Return occurred for the first time to Nietzsche, '* at
6000 feet above the sea and far higher still above all
things human.'' What is the philosophy of the
Everlasting Return ?

The sum of forces which constitute the universe
appear to be both constant and determined. We
cannot suppose that these forces diminish, even in the
smallest degree, for were this the case the sum-total
would have been exhausted long before now, as an
infinite lapse of time has preceded this present moment.
We are equally unable to suppose that the sum-total
of cosmic forces increases constantly ; for in order to
increase, nourishment is necessary ; and whence could
this nourishment, this factor necessary to growth, be
obtained ? If we believe in an indefinite progression
of the cosmic forces, we believe in a perpetual miracle.
We are thus left in the presence of one single hypothe-
sis, that the sum of cosmic forces is not indefinite, but

232 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

definite and constant. Now, let us suppose those
forces reacting one on another at haphazard, in accord-
ance with the law of combinations, one combination
producing necessarily the following combinations,
and so on throughout eternal time. What will
happen ? In the first place, we are obliged to admit
that these forces have never attained permanent
equilibrium, and that such an equilibrium will never
be attained. Such a combination is not per se
an impossiblity, but, were it possible, it must have
been arrived at ere now, seeing that time is infinite ;
and, had it been produced, life would exist no longer,
as movement is inherent to life, and complete equi-
librium signifies that state which exists when the
forces belonging to an aggregate and capable of being
opposed by it to the forces of the environment, are
balanced by the forces to which the aggregate is
exposed — that is, death. Now, we are confronted by
the fact that a sum of forces which is constant and
determined produces in the infinity of time a series
of combinations. Since time is infinite, and since the
sum of active forces is not infinite hut determined, a
moment must come when the simple chances of
combinations reproduce a condition of momentary
equilibrium which has already been realised. But
this combination, once reproduced, must cause the
entire series of combinations once produced to occur
again, in virtue of the law of universal determinism.
In this way, the evolution of the world brings back
an indefinite number of times the same phases and
combinations ; it is a gigantic wheel revolving in
eternal time and eternal space. Every one of us has
lived an indefinite number of times this life of his,
and every one of us will continue to live this life over
and over again, eternally.

THE OVER-MAN 233

This thought of the Everlasting Return of all things
inspired Nietzsche with mingled dread and enthusiasm.
*' Man ! " he wrote, '' thy whole life, like an hour-
glass, will ever return and will ever flow back — each
one of these existences being separated from the
other only by the great long minute of time necessary
in order that all the conditions which gave thee birth
may be reproduced in the universal cycle. And then
shalt thou find again every suffering and every joy,
and every friend and every foe, and every hope and
every error, and every blade of grass and every ray
of sunshine, and the whole order of things. This
cycle, in which thou art an atom, reappears again.
And in every cycle of human existence there is
one hour, one supreme hour, in which, at first one
individual, then many, then all, attain to the con-
sciousness of that most powerful of thoughts — the
Everlasting Return of all things ; and in each case
humanity attains through that thought the hour of
midday." ^

And, indeed, it requires no ordinary courage to be
able to face that conception of the Everlasting Return
of all things. When one thinks of it, when one reflects
on the meaning of it, it appears truly intolerable.
How many are there who could support cheerfully
and without indescribable horror the thought that
every tear and every suffering, and every disillusion-
ment and every disappointment, and every care and
every tragedy, are to recur again, and not once, and
not twice, but eternally ? What does such a doctrine
signify to all those '* who are weary and are heavy-
laden ? "

In truth, the doctrine of the Everlasting Return
is not for such as these. It is one of those truths —

' " Werke," xii. 122.

234 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche is always affirming the truth of certain
propositions, although he professes to be an irrecon-
cilable enemy of the truth — ^which are not '' for the
multitude/* Were such a truth communicated to the
masses, then nihilism of the worst kind, disgust and
hatred of life, would be the natural consequences.
It is essentially a truth destined only for such as are
fit to receive it — and these are the Over-Men and the
superior race generally.

The Everlasting Return is the sanction of this race.
It is a sort of test of its strength, of its power of
resistance, and of its love of life. The great doctrine
of Nietzsche, the amor fati^ the Dionysian love of
life under all its forms, of life whatever it may be or
bring, this doctrine finds its supreme realisation in
the Over-Man. The Over-Man is a fatalist ; he is also
an illusionist ; but he is also and above all brave,
and he is also and above all passionately fond of life.
He is a fatalist, who knows that an inexorable Destiny
hangs over mankind ; he know^s that he himself is a
fatality ; he is an illusionist, who entertains no vam
dreams as to the reality of things, who knows that
there is no answer to the eternal *' Wherefore? " of
humanity, that the world has neither aim nor sense
nor justification in itself, that our knowledge, our
much-vaunted knowledge itself, is but an instrument
in the struggle for existence. But the Over-Man is
brave, and he loves life, he loves life above all things,
and he loves life because life is the one fact which is
established, because life is the one possibility of
realising his own power and his own possibilities.
Browning has said of life :

" For Life, with all it brings of Joy and Woe
And Hope and Fear ;
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning Love."

THE OVER-MAN 235

Not of learning love alone, replies the Over-Man,
but of learning also Hate, and the great hate as well
as the great love — in a word, life is just our chance
of the prize of learning Life itself, and life in all its
aspects, life in its integrity, the dangerous life and the
adventurous life, and the life which always creates,
and which is essentially the life of action. And this
chance, in the view of the Over-Man, can never be
long enough. Life is so full of hidden treasures, so
rich with infinite possibilities, that eternity alone
suffices to exhaust it. Life is worth eternity. Not
only is life worth living once, now — but it is worth
living over and over again, eternally, unceasingly,
because of the chance it gives us of realising its
infinite possibilities. Such is the great doctrine — a
doctrine in which we are transported beyond and
above mere optimism or pessimism into a sphere
of enthusiastic affirmation — which Zarathustra
preaches unto those who are weary of life and who
regard life, with Schopenhauer, as '' the greatest
crime of all."

And Zarathustra has preached the gospel of life,
of the love of life, of the beauties of life ; he has
opened vast horizons to our view, beyond which
stretch horizons vaster still, stretching into infinity.
'' All these bold birds who fly away to the horizon :
certainly ! somewhere or other must they stop, some
day must they reach a point beyond which they can-
not fly. . . . But should we conclude therefore that no
further immensity stretches before them, that they
have gone as far as one can go ? All our greatest
masters and forerunners have at length come to a
standstill, and it is by no means the proudest or most
attractive of situations, that of a tired traveller come
to a standstill ; you and I must both of us experience

236 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

it. But what matters it to you or me ! Other birds
will fly farther ! Our insight and behef accompanies
them in their flight upwards, it rises straight above
our head and above its impotence, it sees the flock
of far more powerful birds than we are, birds who are
aiming at that which was also our aim, and where all
around is the endless ocean ! And whither do we
seek to go ? Do we seek to cross the ocean ? . . .
Why do we steer just towards that very spot where,
up till now, every sun of humanity has gone down ?
Will it be said of us perhaps, that we also, bound for
the west, hoped to discover a new India — but that
our fate was to be shipwrecked among the seas of
Infinity ? " ^ To this question, which Nietzsche
poses at the end of '' Morgenrothe," Zarathustra
answers confidently and joyfuUy. What matters
it if we be shipwrecked ? What matters it if we
founder among the icebergs of the Arctic seas or lose
ourselves among the mists of the ocean of Infinity ?
Life is a means of experience. The beauty of life
resides in its dangers, in its privations, in its sacrifices
voluntarily endured and cheerfully, in its great
adventures. The life which is good is the life which
seeks its fullest reahsation, through peril and hardship
and adventure, even though it be shipwrecked in the
course of its dangerous explorations. But precisely
because of these dangerous operations should we love
life and value life, and we should love life and value
life to such an extent that we are ready to live this
life over and over again, to live it eternally so that we
may go ever further on the road of exploration, so
that we may be able to confront ever new perils, and
thus realise life in the true sense of the word.
The Over-Man is thus first andforemost a brave man,
' " Werke," iv. 371-372.

THE OVER-MAN 237

intrepid, daring, adventurous, fond of danger. And
this courage applies not only to the physical domain,
but also to the psychological. The philosopher who,
in the silence of his study, seeks to probe the deepest
problems of knowledge, problems on which depends
the very existence of the human species — the philoso-
pher who seeks ever the " psychological nudity ''
of every problem which confronts him — such a
philosopher is not less brave and adventurous and
intrepid than the explorer of jungles and deserts.
But the Over-Man is essentially the most complete
type of humanity. He will be as superior to the man
of to-day as man is superior to the gorilla. The
Over-Man will combine both physical and mental
capacities in the highest degree. He will himself
create the tables of values for humanity and for
himself. He will incarnate all the progress of
humanity ; he will synthetise the combined labour of
all the units forming the social organisation ; he will
represent the profit realised by that labour. By his
deeds, by his creation as by his destruction, he will
justify humanity and give a reply to the '' Wherefore ? ' '
with which humanity seeks to justify its existence.
If it be asked if we have had any Over-Men up till now
in history, it may be replied that Pericles and Themis-
tocles, Thucydides and ^Eschylus, Alexander and
Julius Caesar, Macchiavelli and Cesare Borgia, Shake-
speare and Goethe, Napoleon and Cecil Rhodes have,
all of them, in different ways, been approaches to the
type. They have approached the Over-Man alike
by their intellectual and physical power, by their
contempt for all morals, by their gigantic superiority
over the rest of mankind. But the Over-Man will
surpass all these, alike by his intellectual and physical
force — ^he will be a great destroyer and a scourge —

238 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

by his contempt for the moral law, and by his
immeasurable superiority over mere man. In the
Over-Man will be realised the synthesis of humanity's
collective efforts and force. The Over-Man, by his
very existence, will justify humanity.

CHAPTER V

NIETZSCHE AND MAX STIRNER

The name of Max Stirner, the author of that remark-
able work, '* The Unique and his Property/' ^ is a name
almost unknown, especially in England. And yet
this work of Stirner is in many respects a remarkable
one. Professor Basch, in the va uable study of Stirner
and his doctrines which he published recently, has
remarked :

'' Stirner was noticed first of all as a precursor
of Nietzsche. Subsequently, on studying the
''Unique" more profoundly, it was discovered — ac-
cording to Eduard von Hartmann — that not only is
this genial work by no means inferior in style to the
compositions of Nietzsche, but that also its philo-
sophical value is a thousand times greater. If
Nietzsche was the poet and the musician of unyielding
individualism, Stirner endeavoured to be its philo-
sophic champion. Stirner gave to individualism the
only psychological foundation on which it could be
established — namely, the pre-eminence of feeling and
will over the strictly intellectual faculties. And,
through this combat which he sustained against
intellectuahsm, Stirner found himself closely allied

^ " Der Einzige und sein Eigentum." Published in 1843.
A French translation by M. Reclaire has been published by
Stock, in Paris. With regard to the career of Stirner, vide
J. H. Mackay : '* Max Stirner, sein Leben, sein Werk "
(Berlin, 1898).

239

240 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

to one of the leading tendencies of contemporary
philosophic thought. . . . Stirner is an anarchist-
individualist and, despite his words of sympathy for
the proletariat, he is an aristocrat, whereas the
theoricians of contemporary anarchism are, all of
them, democrats and communists. But Stirner, like
them, is an anarchist. Like them, he insists above all
things on the total liberation of the individual, on the
substitution of voluntary co-operation for compulsory
co-operation, of the regime of contract for the regime
of coercion, of the regime of association for the
regime of the State.'' ^

This appreciation of Professor Basch requires, to
our mind, considerable modification. We are unable
to agree with Dr von Hartmann that Stirner's work,
aUke as regards the style and the contents, is superior
to that of Nietzsche. Doubtless Dr von Hartmann
is embittered against Nietzsche owing to the deadly
sarcasms of the latter at his expense. As to Stirner
being a precursor of Nietzsche, this is true only to a
very limited extent. But as several authorities on
Nietzsche have sought to connect the two names,
and to show identities between Stirner and Nietzsche
which are, we think, more or less doubtful, we
think it advisable to devote a brief discussion to
the subject.

Let us begin by admitting that there do indeed
exist several points of contact between these two
philosophers, of which the most striking is the exalta-
tion of egoism by both. " Ego sum Ego " says Stirner.
*' For Me, nothing is above Me. . . . My object is
neither good nor bad, neither love nor hatred, my
object is my own — and it is Unique, even as I am

^ Vide Basch : " L'Individualisme Anarchiste : Max Stirner/'
pp. iii.-iv. (Paris, 1904).

NIETZSCHE AND MAX STIRNER 241

Unique/' Egoism, repeats Nietzsche, is the first
and greatest of qualities; what is repugnant, what
is detestable, is not egoism, which constitutes the
essence of our nature ; what is detestable is the con-
ceahng of egoism, or the attempt to conceal it, under
the specious names of altruism, love of others,
sympathy. Both Stirner and Nietzsche aim at the
integral realisation of life ; both aim at the highest
possible exaltation of the individual ; both continu-
ally oppose the individual and his rights as individual,
to the State, the Church, the moral law, and other
extraneous and illegitimate claimants. Both these
are individualists, who believe in life, and life and
liberty, in power, in the integral life.

So far Stirner and Nietzsche are agreed ; and were
we only to look upon the surface, there would seem
no reason for refusing to establish a strict parallel
between the poet of Zarathustra and the more than
half -forgotten author of *' Der Einzige." For we see
that both Stirner and Nietzsche idealise force. Both
believe in the Will of Power as the cardinal fact of
existence. Both insist on the pre-eminence of the
voluntary over the purely intellectual sentiments.
Both consider the Will as the elementary factor, and
both glorify force and power and the development,
unchecked and unfettered, of the strong man, ruthless
and unscrupulous in its strength.

Certainly, we are far from denying the fact that on
all these points Stirner has preceded Nietzsche. Yet
when we come to look closer, we find that the idea
which actuated Stirner is by no means the idea which
actuated Nietzsche. Stirner has concentrated his
attention exclusively on the individual as individual.
Nietzsche has always had in view the cultivation of
a superior race. Beyond and above the individual,

242 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Nietzsche has cast his eyes on the race, on the race
of the future, strong, noble, free ; justifying the whole
of creation by its strength, nobility and freedom.

Thus Nietzsche is an individualist, but he is an
individualist not for the sake of the individual as
individual, but for the sake of the race. Nietzsche
is filled with admiration before the spectacle of a
Cesare Borgia or a Napoleon, these grand specimens
of the '' tropical man," these examples of the robust,
fearless, unfettered human beast of prey. But he
looks upon them as possessing a supreme value in that
through them, and on account of them, humanity is
justified, and the whole of creation is justified. Such
types of humanity as Cesare Borgia and Napoleon,
such types as the Over-Man of the future, are works
of art, gloriously beautiful in their strength, in their
ferocious Will of Power. But their supreme value as
works of art is that they are the justification of the
world. If, on the one hand, humanity possesses no
value or beauty in itself, and exists only for the
benefit of a few superior types ; on the other hand,
these superior types are to be admired, not so
much for their purely individual beauty, but because
by them man is justified, and the whole of creation
is rendered beautiful, and life receives its supreme
sanction. Their individual beauty shines forth upon
the whole of creation, and imparts to all life a value
which is permanent and undying. The glory of
one single one of these Over-Men constitutes also
the glory of the whole of existence. '' Suppose we
have said yes to one single second, so have we
said yes, not only to ourselves, but to the whole
of existence. For nothing stands alone, whether in
ourselves or in the world. And if, in one supreme
moment, our soul has trembled like unto a harp

NIETZSCHE AND MAX STIRNER 243

in the fulness of its joy, so was eternity necessary
in order to bring about this one moment, and the
whole of eternity was in this one moment sanctioned,
redeemed, justified, and affirmed." ^

Nietzsche has laid especial stress on the need of
increasing the strength of the collectivity, so as to be
able to form an excess of strength, which excess shall
constitute a reserve for the future generation. Nietz-
sche's whole thought concerns the generation of to-
morrow, the race of the future, the race of conquerors,
of the Over-Man. Zarathustra lays especial strength
on the aim and ideal of marriage, as being the pro-
creation of the creator, of the Over-Man. Nietzsche,
once more, is an individualist for the sake of the
future. He preaches the liberation of man, the culti-
vation of egoism, because only by means of liberty and
egoism can the Over-Man of to-morrow be created.

Nietzsche is an egoist, most certainly ; and he
preaches egoism — unrestrained, ferocious egoism.
But does he preach it for the sake of the joys of the
egoist, does he preach it from any utilitarian motive ?
Emphatically no. Nietzsche's egoism is an ideal
egoism, an egoism which is to be practised because
only through it can an amelioration of the human race
take place. It is an egoism which ends by destroy-
ing itself. Nietzsche, indeed, says : '' Be egotistical,
cultivate your individuality, realise life, your life,
integrally, fully, wholly, realise your life to the utmost
of its possibilities ; destroy greatly and create greatly.
And in thus cultivating your strength and powers,
by thus destroying and creating, you will give to
humanity a splendid example of the Will of Power.
Make war, if it be in your power, massacre, create
havoc, remodel the map of the world at your pleasure,

' " Werke," xv. 484.

244 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

use the lives of hundreds of thousands of slaves as
pawns in the great game you are playing with Chance,
assert yourself and your power at whatever cost, be
extravagant and thriftless in blood and treasure out
of the boundless wealth of your personality — and you
will remain in history as one of the great landmarks
of humanity, as one of its masterpieces of art, as one
of its eternal riddles, and also as one of those monu-
ments which arise, rare and far between, more solid
than granite and whiter than white marble, and
which proclaim to the four horizons : ' life is worth
living, humanity is justified, the world is redeemed,
by me/ " The aim of the egoist, in a word, should
be not self-satisfaction alone ; but also, and above
all, the redemption through him of all life.

Such, however, is not the thought of Stirner :
egoism begins and ends with the individual. For
Stirner, it is not *' man '' or '' the race " which is the
ideal; it is the " individual," the Unique, the Ego.
Whereas Stirner proclaims the essential unicity of the
Ego, Nietzsche recognises expressly the solidarity
inter pares of the superior race, of the Over-Men.
It may be objected that Stimer's association of
egoists is the equivalent of Nietzsche's idea of the
moral system of the masters. But there is a funda-
mental difference. Nietzsche has based his whole
theory of the Over-Man on the separation of humanity
into two distinct races, well apart, without lien or
connection between them. For Nietzsche there is a
race of masters and a race of slaves ; and the assertion
of their individuality, unrestrained and unfettered,
is permitted solely to the masters. Stirner makes
no such distinction, at all events theoretically. In
practice his doctrine must result inevitably in the
triumph of the stronger. But Stirner is, as Professor

NIETZSCHE AND MAX STIRNER 245

Basch well says, an anarchist ; and Nietzsche is just
the very reverse.

Stirner throws aside all morality. For the Ego,
for the Unique, nothing exists but himself. The
Unique knows no object except his own object.
God, Spirit, Morality, all are phantoms. The Ego
alone is a reality. The social organisation of Stirner
is anarchy, and the most complete anarchy, and the
unrestrained conflict of all against all ; for everyone
has a right to everything which it is in his power to
possess. Force is the sole law. The one object of
life is the entire satisfaction of life, but understood
in a hedonistic sense. Stirner is as essentially
hedonistic as he is anarchical.

But Nietzsche, too, preaches the gospel of force,
and of the ruthless trampling down of the weak, and
of the equally ruthless advent of the Over-Man ?
Perfectly true. Yet Nietzsche differs from Stirner in
that he is neither hedonistic nor an anarchist, and in
that he arrives at the establishment of a law which,
whether it be inter pares only or not, is none the
less a law, and a strict law, a very strict law in fact.
Let us see.

Nietzsche proclaims himself an immoralist ; and
yet he arrives at moralism, and at a very rigid moral-
ism. It may be a moralism which is " beyond moral-
ism '' (*' Jenseits der Moral ''), to use a favourite
phrase of his. But, if the masters have no duties
towards the inferior races, their subordinates ; if
force is the only law which they know as far as the
inferior races are concerned ; yet inter pares the
masters have a moral law, and they obey it. The
very fact of commanding them to '' realise life in all
its plenitude," to '' live fully," is itself already a law.
And the masters are exhorted to great self-sacrifice.

246 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

to be hard towards themselves as towards others,
to be rigorously hard towards themselves, to be
chivalrous and honourable towards their equals, in a
word, to render themselves worthy of their caste and
of their traditions. Thus from behind the immoral-
ism of Nietzsche springs up a system of morals — a
code of honour inter pares, Nietzsche would have
called it, but a code of honour implies some sort of
morality underlying it. The thought which must
always inspire the masters, which must be the
leitmotif of these masters, is the thought of the
race of to-morrow. The whole world-process is a
perpetual Becoming, without reason or sanction in
itself, and it is the duty of the masters to create a
sanction for it, to give it, out of the plenitude of their
power, a reason. Humanity is thus justified by the
superior types which it produces ; and on these types
lies the responsibility, the heavy responsibility, of
justifying humanity.

Thus the masters have their rights certainly ; they
have the right to develop themselves integrally, to
employ the inferior types of humanity as pawns or
instruments in the great game they are playing.
But if they have rights, heavy also are their duties,
both towards themselves and towards the race.
Their duty it is to adventure themselves, to risk life
and honour a thousand times, to live in constant peril ;
their duty it is, also, to be hard towards themselves ;
the bed of moss is denied them, and, if they are
permitted to stretch humanity on the bed of thorns,
that bed of thorns is also their usual place of repose.
The masters are above optimism, as they are above
pessimism. They are ferocious towards others, they
are a scourge for humanity, they deliberately inflict
the direst sufferings on humanity. But they do this

NIETZSCHE AND MAX STIRNER 247

because they know that only in the school of suffering,
in the school of intense suffering, can humanity be
regenerated and redeemed. And they ! The Over-
Man, the creator, is he who must necessarily suffer,
and intensely suffer, who mast be broken on the wheel,
torn, burned, racked, confronted with every hardship
and every misery, because only by these means can
he learn to live greatly. In order to live greatly it
is necessary to live dangerously.

Those who represent the Over-Man as the incarna-
tion of selfishness are thus grievously mistaken. It
is not his own pleasure that the Over-Man seeks, but
the justification of the eternal Becoming, which is the
eternal world-process, but the redemption of humanity
through suffering, through great and intense suffering.
And out of this intense suffering emerges precisely
that supreme object and work of art which is the
Over-Man, who by his deeds shall justify all that
which is miserable and pitiable in life, and raise it to
a pinnacle of beauty. The Over-Man, modelled in the
school of suffering, shall in turn reflect his own glory
on the whole of life ; and life, viewed in the wondrous
light shed on it by the glory of the Over-Man, shall
be redeemed and affirmed and sanctified and justified.

Such, then, is the egoism of Nietzsche. It is
an egoism which confounds itself with what we are
accustomed to call altruism, and altruism in the
highest sense. The egoism of Nietzsche, in a word,
is the egoism, not of the individual, but of the race,
of the superior race, who by their egoism, and through
their egoism, and on account of their egoism, justify
humanity, and redeem life from what it would other-
wise be — a process without sense or reason or aim.
The egoism of Nietzsche depasses the individual.
It breaks down the barriers set up by the fact of in-

248 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

dividuation, and beyond the individual, beyond the
circle of individual pleasures and pains, it sees the
vast panorama of the future of the race, it sees the
panorama of life in its entirety, of life rendered
beautiful and rendered worth living, not once nor
twice, but eternally.

Even as the egoism of Nietzsche depasses the
individual, so does it depass the egoism of Stirner.
Stirner fixes his regard, not on the race, not on life in
general, but solely on the individual, on the Unique.
Every ideal, those of humanity, of fatherland, of the
race, of God, of morality — all vanish and disappear
as soon as the Ego afhrms himself, glorious and all-
powerful in his unicity. The Unique of Stirner cares
not for the race, he recognises no such thing as inter
pares, for is he not Unique, incomparable ? The
justification of life as a supreme artistic creation, the
justification of all life in its superior manifestations ;
such is not the thought of Stirner. His Unique
remains the Unique and incomparable Ego, the sole
reality, whose object is neither good nor bad, nor
love nor hatred, but which is solely his own. The
Unique of Stirner seeks not to justify all life by his
deeds ; he cares not whether all life be justified in
him, by the reflection of his beauty and power. He
seeks only himself, he cares only for himself. Stimer's
egoism is limited by the fact of individuation. It does
not surpass the individual. For Stirner the individual
is not merely the centre of all things, he is the only
thing. " Far from me that object which is not My
object," he exclaims. The other has no tangible
reality for the Ego. The only reality is the self.
Obviously, all idea of a superior race, all idea of a
justification of life by this superior race, is abolished,
since the Ego is Unique, incomparable. Consequently

NIETZSCHE AND MAX STIRNER 249

the duties which Nietzsche imposes on the Over-Man
are disdained scornfully by the Unique. What
reason exists for suffering ? Because only through
suffering can the creator be hardened and rendered
fit to fulfil his task, which is the creation of art, which
is the giving to humanity of a new table of values
which shall justify and redeem life. To this the
Unique would reply : by virtue of what right do you
speak to me of a task ? The only task I know is My
own task, that which I have set to myself. What
signifies it, this giving to humanity of a new table of
values which shall justify life ? I know not humanity,
and the only value I know is My own value, which is
unique and incomparable even as I am xmique and
incomparable.

Thus the egoism of Nietzsche differs from the
egoism of Stirner, in depassing it. The difference be-
tween these two thinkers is equally great as concerns
the other points enumerated by Professor Basch.
Stirner favours voluntary as against compulsory co-
operation. He pronounces in favour of the regime
of contract as against the regime of compulsion.
On both these points he is diametrically opposed to
Nietzsche. And this difference is quite natural, and
springs from the fact that Stirner is an anarchist and
Nietzsche an autocrat. Between the anarchism of
the one and the autocracy of the other, there can
necessarily be but few points of contact.

We do not say that Stirner was not somewhat
illogical ; or if illogical be a hard word to employ with
regard to a thinker who is rigorously logical on most
points, we will say that Stirner did not perhaps quite
appreciate all the results which would necessarily arise
from the application of his system to the social organ-
isation. The voluntary co-operation and the regime

250 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

of contract which he favoured more or less vaguely —
for Stirner is not a lucid writer — would soon cease in
the conflict of all against all, when the strongest
acquire everything to which their strength entitles
them. The system of Stirner would lead necessarily
to the triumph of the strong over the weak.^

Nietzsche's merit is that, foreseeing this result of his
own system, he has succeeded in avoiding that anarchy
which he detested above all things, and which Stirner
favoured. For Nietzsche, the triumph of the strong,
the brutal and pitiless triumph, is not a mere victory
of animal passions ; it is, in the thought of Nietzsche,
a victory of the fittest over the less fit, of the better
and stronger races of humanity over the weaker.
Thus it is a triumph which results in an amelioration
of the human race, in an increase of its power. With
Nietzsche, the ultima ratio, to which everything is
reduced, is the race. The egoism of the individual
is justified only in the light of its ultimate value to
the race. With Stirner, the individual is himself
the ultima ratio, and his own individual satisfaction
constitutes the justification of his egoism.

Herein lies the principal difference, the radical
difference, between Stirner and Nietzsche. We do not
judge between them. The work of Stirner is a great
work, pitiless in its logic, fruitful in many of its results.
The Unique, the strong man, who knows no law but
the law of his own force, the destroyer of gods and

^That is to say, once the stronger types of humanity are definitely
in possession of power, " voluntary " co-operation and " contract "
would necessarily cease as far as the vanquished are concerned.
Voluntary co-operation and contract are excellent instruments for
enabling the strong to reap the advantages of their strength.
But, once the power obtained, it is certain that slavery and des-
potism would soon be substituted for voluntary co-operation and
contract.

NIETZSCHE AND MAX STIRNER 251

ideals, the incomparable Ego whose every act reveals
the ferocious and unmoral Will of Power behind it —
this is a striking conception, and the work of Stirner
may prove a veritable consolation to those strong and
proud spirits who are disgusted with the spectacle
of modern politics and are broken-hearted at the
sight of the bankruptcy of every ideal which the
*' century of liberalism and progress " has worshipped
one after another, and who stand to-day in morose
solitude like rocks amidst the boundless ocean. For
such as these is Stimer's work destined, and by such
as these will it be understood. But Nietzsche has
gone out beyond Stirner. He has adopted Stirner's
conception and depassed it. Transformed by the
genius of Nietzsche, Stirner's Unique has become
more than the centre of his own individuality ; his
activity has been extended ; and the egoist, through
his egoism and force and Will of Power, has become
the great creator, through whom all life and all
becoming are redeemed and justified.

CHAPTER VI

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE

In concluding this study of the philosophy of Nietz-
sche, it is fitting to examine the question of the value
of Nietzsche as philosopher, thinker and poet. That
the influence of Nietzsche has been great, that it has
been immense, all over Europe, and especially in
France and Germany, is in itself no proof of the value
of Nietzsche's philosophic thought. It is, indeed,
very largely explained by the style of his writing and
by the force of his expression. The aphorism is a
convenient manner of expressing one's philosophic
thought. It dispenses the writer from any great
dialectic effort. It expresses in an apodictical form
propositions which, although they do but represent
the opinion of the writer, appear under this form in
the light of an axiomatical truth. The aphorism
in addition permits of a force of expression, of a
robustness of language, which might be decidedly
out of place in a dialectical or schematical work.
Nietzsche's success with the mass is undoubtedly due
in large measure to the aphorism. His success must
also, in large part, and unfortunately, be attributed
to the violence of his language, to the virulence of his
attacks on ideas and symbols held sacred by human-
ity, to the exaggeration in which he revelled. But
these are the baser causes of his success. In the
world of thinkers and philosophers his success is due
partly to the very grandeur of his philosophic thought,

252

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 253

partly to his undaunted intrepidity, partly to the
depth of his insight into men and things, partly to the
sublime poetry with which he clothed all his teaching.
For Nietzsche is a great artist, a great poet, a pro-
found and bold and courageous thinker, and one of the
greatest psychologists which the world has produced.

We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by that
exaggeration which is at once a weakness and a great
asset of Nietzsche's, '' There is not one single
buffoonery in the gospels ; that alone suffices to
condemn a book.'' '' One must put on gloves in order
to touch the gospels, so as to preserve one's hands
from contamination." '' The two greatest plagues
of the human race, Christianity and alcoholism."
" I will write this eternal indictment of Christianity
upon every wall. ... I will use letters which even
the blind can see. I denounce Christianity as the One
great Curse, as the One Corruption, as the One great
instinct of revenge for which no means are too
poisonous, treacherous, and small — ^I denounce it as
the one undying disgrace of humanity."

This outburst of fury against Christianity is
explained by the view taken by Nietzsche of the in-
ception of that religion, coupled with the view held
by him of existence in general. Nietzsche is an
enthusiastic and passionate advocate of the life in
force and in beauty. His ideal is the Greek ideal,
the ideal of Dionysus and Apollo ; life at any price,
life with all its woes and joys and hopes and fears,
worshipped, glorified, cultivated ; the Over-Man as
supreme type incarnating this Dionysian and Apol-
linian vision of life, incarnating the beauty and
purity and symmetry of form, the power and force
and strength of the unrestrained and unmoral Will
of Power ; such is Nietzsche's ideal. And opposed to

254 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

this ideal, diametrically opposed to it, hindering and
retarding its realisation, Nietzsche sees the anaemic
ideal preached by primitive Christianity, which re-
gards life as a woe, and the earth as a vale of tears,
and which glorifies the weakest and most abject types
of humanity — the slave, the publican, the outcast,
the leper. What wonder is it that Nietzsche hated
Christianity ? Humanity, according to Nietzsche,
is justified solely by its superior types, by the Over-
Men which it produces, and who by their force, their
beauty, their creative power, justify the whole world.
The redeemer of the world is not he who dies for the
sins of the world ; the redeemer is he who lives, and
who by his life shows man the infinite possibilities of
existence, who by his life opens out new horizons
which tell of beauty and of force and of great expan-
sion. The redeemer affirms life by his glorification
of it. Each new creation, each new work of art,
each great example is a new redemption. Not only
iEschylus and Shakespeare, Goethe and Beethoven,
Praxiteles and Raphael are redeemers of life, and
affirmers of life ; but also the great warrior : he who
has, by his very power of destruction, awakened man
to a consciousness of his strength and of his place
in the universe, and thereby set a new ideal before
humanity — an Alexander, a Borgia, a Napoleon —
is a redeemer of humanity.

The meaning of Nietzsche is that there are two
distinct systems of morals — the morals of the Masters
and the morals of the slaves. And the ulterior
significance of this division is that there are two races,
anthropologically distinct, even as they are mentally
and morally distinct. There is a superior race, and
there is an inferior race. By this division, Nietzsche
does not mean arbitrarily to divide the human species

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 255

into two anthropological races. His meaning is that,
given an indefinite number of races, or of '' ethnics/'
which is the term preferred by the anthroposociological
school, these races may, alike from the physical and
mental point of view, be roughly divided into a
superior and inferior race. The superior race, which
is strong, which incarnates the unchecked Will of
Power, which loves beauty and symmetry, which is
in every respect a race alike of conquerors and of
artists — of conquerors and artists, understood not
in the narrow sense of the words, but conquerors and
artists in every domain, whether physical, moral or
aesthetic — this superior race will have a moral code
reflecting its character, a moral code in which all the
virtues of the Will of Power will celebrate their
saturnalia. On the other hand, the inferior race,
living in constant fear and dread of the tyranny of the
superior race — the inferior race, weak alike in vital
power and in initiative, weak physically and incar-
nating a deep physiological degeneracy ; this race will
have a code of morals as diametrically opposed to
that of the masters, as the physical character of each
is opposed. On the one hand, therefore, a code of
morals in which good signifies all that which is strong
and powerful and beautiful, and which reflects an
exuberant and overflowing vitality ; on the other
hand, a code of morals in which the first evaluation is
transvaluated, to use Nietzsche's favourite expression,
and in which good is synonymous with all that is
weak and degenerate ; weakness becomes goodness,
cowardice becomes humility, the lust of hate and the
war against all that is successful and strong becomes
the *' fight against sin '' ; the slaves and outcasts
become the '' elect of God '' ; to them is promised the
" Kingdom of Heaven '' ; and it is decreed that it is

256 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle
than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Cowardice and meanness and the impotency to
avenge oneself are here exalted, and it is expressly
recommended that, when struck upon the one cheek,
the other should be voluntarily offered to the aggressor.
How different to the code of the aristocrat, of the
strong man, conscious of his power and of his greatness,
and whose code is not merely an eye for an eye or a
tooth for a tooth, but destruction for its own sake, de-
struction as an expression of exuberant vitality, de-
struction as a safety-valve for a great and formidable
Will of Power, destruction as a means of creation !

Creation ! Such is the great task, the great mission
of the superior man, of him whom Nietzsche calls the
Over-Man. The creation of a new table of moral and
metaphysical values, which shall reverse the table
of Christian values ; the creation of art and beauty,
in which man shall see his own power reflected, in
which he shall be uplifted above himself, in which
he shall find the inspiration which shall give him
renewed courage and confidence in himself and in his
destiny. The creation of a new ideal, of a new
supreme value for humanity — such is the task of the
Over-Man ; and it is a task which is great, which is
herculean, which requires for its adequate fulfilment
all those qualities of strength, courage, and of artistic
inspiration, with which the Over-Man is endowed.

But if the Over-Man be necessary for humanity,
so is the slave and the mediocrity necessary. The
Over-Man is necessary as a creator of new values
for the whole race. And, in order to do so, he must
redeem humanity from the degradation which
afflicts it at the present moment, as the result of
nineteen centuries of Christianity. To redeem

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 257

humanity, it is necessary to scourge it, to inflict upon
it every hardship and every suffering, because only
in the school of suffering — of intense suffering — can
humanity be purged and purified — only in the school
of intense suffering can the creator himself be steeled
to his task, be rendered worthy to fulfil his task as
creator.

But the creator, the Over-Man, must fix his atten-
tion on his task as a creator of new values, of values
which shall determine for humanity its aim for a
thousand years to come. The Over-Man needs the
masses under him, he needs them in order to sub-
sist. The ordinary work of civilisation, the drudgery
and toil of life, must needs be performed ; and
its performance requires a vast host of workers,
willing, laborious, obedient, of mediocre intelligence,
diligent, unpretending. The life of these drudges
and toilers of civilisation must needs be hard and must
needs be monotonous ; but there is every reason to
suppose that, in a social organisation firmly established
and controlled by a will of iron, the position of these
toilers would be more secure than it is to-day in the
modern State. Contempt for these toilers of civilisa-
tion, or detestation of them, is unworthy of the
philosopher and the superior man. The latter must
keep his rank, he must jealously guard the dignity of
his position ; but he must look on the masses as
*' Werkzeuge " — that is to say, as tools which he, the
sculptor, needs, in order to create out of the shapeless
block of marble, which is humanity, a statue worthy
of himself, and worthy to be set up as an ideal before
humanity in the coming generations.

Such, then, is the central idea of Nietzsche. It is
an idea which is essentially aristocratic and anti-

258 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

democratic. It constitutes the antithesis of the ideal
which is current to-day — the ideal of equality and
liberty for all men. This modern ideal, which finds in
Nietzsche its most formidable opponent, is due in part
to Christianity ; in part to the influence of Kant and
of the school of Liberal philosophy which teaches
that every man should be treated as an end in himself,
not as a means ; in part to modern science and to the
culture which science favours ; in part to the State,
which is itself the outcome of the three preceding
factors. And thus Christianity and Liberalism and
science and the State, all find in Nietzsche a relentless
antagonist.

Along with this central idea of Nietzsche, we find
some extremely interesting side-glances at certain
problems of psychological importance, such as the
origin of sin and the role of the priest among the
inferior race. '' Conscience '' and '' sin " — these are
the two great weapons, the two deadly-poisoned
arrows, used by Christianity against the superior
races. Born at a period in which the entire ancient
civilisation of Rome was menaced with destruction,
when the old ideals were fast expiring, when hordes
of barbarians from the East were hastening the work
of destruction and decay, when the old world seemed
to be engulfed in one immense cataclysm, Christianity
had a task which was easy. On the one hand, it had
to do with a dying civilisation, and what more easy
than to inspire the remaining elements of the Roman
nobility with the belief that this formidable catas-
trophe was due to '' sin against God " ? On the other
hand, it had to do with a new race, or rather with new
races, great in their unchecked Will of Power, but
lacking the stamina of the older races. Christianity
set itself the task of rendering these young barbarian

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 259

races ill, ill with the disease of conscience and sin, ill
with the spectacle of the bleeding victim on the cross.
Christianity succeeded. The precise reasons of its
success are doubtful, but the result is certain.

The role of the priest among the inferior race is
an important one. The slaves, according to Nietzsche,
are possessed of every bad instinct of revenge and hate
and lust of destruction. These instincts have been
manifested notably during the French Revolution
— one need only recall the burning of the Bastille,
the September massacres, the noyades of Nantes,
the execution of Marie Antoinette — and again during
the Commune of 1871. It is necessary to keep these
bad instincts of the mass in check ; and the priest,
himself a slave and a degenerate, and knowing
intimately the character of those among whom he
works and lives, acts as a moral policeman for the
masses. The weapon of conscience is as a two-edged
sword. On the one hand, it is the worm which, little
by little, destroys the happiness and the physique
of the strong man, which instils into his mind the
insidious poison of doubt. On the other hand, it is
the means by which the evil instincts of the mass are
held in check and prevented from exploding.

Thus we find Nietzsche ; an aristocrat. Aristo-
cracy is the essence of Nietzsche, aristocrary of senti-
ment, of taste, of thought. As an aristocrat he
glorifies the Over-Man, supreme type of aristocracy ;
as an aristocrat he has a supreme contempt for the
masses ; as an aristocrat he is hard of heart and
preaches hardness, because only in the school of
hardness can the veritable aristocrat be found.

And the other cardinal feature of Nietzsche we
find to be his love of life, his intense love of life, of the

260 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

life in beauty, in power and strength. His love of
life approaches the heroic ; or rather it realises the
heroic. Life is to be loved because life is a means of
experience, because life is a means of creating beauty,
and ever more beauty. Life is the supreme work of
art, and as a work of art life is justified and life is
redeemed.

But life is not in itself a work of art ; it is a work of
art just in the measure that we are ourselves artists,
and creators of art, just in the measure that we, out
of the plenitude of our power, give an artistic value to
life. For this reason is the Over-Man necessary, for
the Over-Man is the great creator, the great and
supreme artist, by whom and through whom all life
is justified and redeemed. And the value of the Over-
Man is such, the beauty of the life which he represents
is so intense, the vision of the possibilities of the
strength and creative power of all life which he holds
out to us is so glorious, life is through him rendered
so supremely valuable, that we can, in the presence
of so magnificent a spectacle, but wish for life to be
eternal, because eternity alone can suffice for the
realisation of those boundless possibilities which the
Over-Man has shown us.

And the doctrine of the Everlasting Return is
the crowning-point of the doctrine of the Over-Man.
The vision of beauty incarnated in the Over-Man is
such that it makes us ardently desire the everlasting
return of all things, so that life may be rendered
ever more beautiful, ever more valuable. Such is
the thought of Nietzsche. And Nietzsche does not
appear to perceive the contradiction into which he
falls. The Everlasting Return, what does it signify ?
It signifies, as Nietzsche has himself told us, that every
hour and every ray of sunshine, and every hope and

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 261

every joy, and every bitter tear and every cruel
suffering and every bleak moment of despair and
disillusionment, must recur, and perpetually recur,
and always and eternally recur. The highest stand-
point to which a man can attain, he tells us, is the
standpoint of amor fati. We are to love life, and
desire life, but life is a colossal Fatality, and against
the inexorable decrees of Fate we can do nothing.
The wise man is he who, recognising this supreme
truth of the deadly fatality of all things, yet is strong
enough to console himself with the thought that he
has wished that which Fate has decreed. By the
sheer power of his thought he is to uplift himself
above Fate, he is to give himself the illusion of a will
which is free, he is to say to all that which takes
place : ''I willed it so.''

" Now do I die and disappear, and in an instant
I will be no longer. The soul is as mortal as the body.

" But the chain of causes of which I am a link
returns — it will create me again. I myself do but
form a link in the chain of causes which make up the
Everlasting Return of things.

'* I will return together with this sun, with this
earth, with this eagle, with this serpent — I will
return not unto a new life, nor unto a better life, nor
unto a similar one.

'* I will return eternally to this same identical life,
both in great things, and in small, so as to teach again
the Everlasting Return of all things —

'* So as to preach again the doctrine of the great Mid-
day, so as to preach again the advent of the Over-Man.

*' I have delivered my message, my message is
fatal unto me ; thus is it decreed by the eternal
Destiny ; I disappear while still a forerunner.'' *

' " VVerke." vi. 322.

262 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

The lyric beauty of the language of Zarathustra
is great, but the logic of Nietzsche's argument is
here less evident. On the one hand, life is eternal,
life must be eternal, life should be desired as eternal,
because life is a perpetual Becoming, because eternity
alone suffices for the realisation of life's beauties,
because the object of life is the creation of beauty,
and the creation of beauty cannot be limited by a
concept of time. In eternity alone can the Over-Man
find scope for his creative power, eternity alone is
worthy of the values which he sets above humanity,
of the monuments which it is his task and privilege
to create. And now we are told that life is not a
perpetual Becoming, that it is something fixed and
rigid, and something fixed immutably for all eternity.
How, then, can the creator aim at rendering life ever
more beautiful, ever more fertile, if we are condemned
to an everlasting repetition ? Why should the Over-
Man appear to redeem humanity if humanity's fate is
exorably sealed for all time by a mysterious Fate ?
What reason has this eternal life, what sense has this
Everlasting Return of all things ? Ixion is con-
demned eternally to turn the same wheel ! Sisyphus
condemned eternally to see the rock fall back on his
head ! And the reward for this eternal " Streben,"
for this unending martyrdom ? The reward is the
conscience of having the illusion of being oneself
the agent of one's tortures, whereas one knows all the
time that one is but a puppet in the hands of Fate !

In truth the idea is heroic, and herculean and truly
Nietzschean in its heroism. To work perpetually
for the amelioration of the race, to seek to create new
values which shall give to humanity an aim for a
thousand years, to undergo privation and hardship
and suffering in order to be rendered worthy of so

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 263

august a task — and why ? Why, indeed, work and
create and suffer if Ufe be but an Everlasting Return ?
Why seek to beautify Hfe, if Ufe be but the emanation
of an inexorable Fate ? Amor fati I It is a heroic
motto, certainly, but in what way is it capable of
inspiring the creator, of inspiring the Over-Man to
great deeds ? When the creator realises the fact that
he is in truth no creator, but that fatality rules every-
thing, that everything which is, whether good or bad
or hideous or beautiful, is bound to recur, always in
the exact conditions in which it was once produced,
and to recur eternally — when the creator realises this,
will not the cry of amor fati sound rather in his ears
as a gigantic mockery, will he not rather be tempted
to exclaim: '' My, God, my God, why hast thou for-
saken me ? ''

The doctrine of the Everlasting Return, which
Zarathustra has come to reveal as the crowning
doctrine of the whole philosophy of the Over-Man,
remains nevertheless unconvincing. Of course, we
can know for certainty nothing with regard to such
problems as these. Death is the great abyss which
confronts us all, to which all are hurrying ; and as to
what takes place on the other side of that *' little strip
of sea,'' no one can say anything with certainty, for
none who have crossed the line have ever returned.
But, where metaphysical speculation and religious
belief are powerless, science may say a word ; it is
not the final word, perhaps, but the torch of modern
science, both physico-chemical and psycho-physio-
logical, may help to illuminate the darkness of our
path through this labyrinth. Nietzsche has committed
the error, the very serious error, of taking for granted
that the number of combinations of the matter which
composes the universe is a fixed and even limited

264 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

number ; whereas the truth is that the number of
combinations of matter is infinite ; so that the
chances of a repetition of the exact combinations
which have produced the existing conditions of things
are practically nil. The mysticism of Nietzsche
is interesting in that it shows the extent to which this
enthusiastic prophet of the Over-Man is prepared to
push his affirmation of life ; and in truth no af-
firmation of life can go beyond that contained in
the philosophy of the Everlasting Return. But
this mysticism must be pronounced to be without
practical value in the history of philosophic thought.

Nietzsche is known to the great public chiefxy by
certain famous aphorisms, such as the affirmation
that '' every great act is a crime/' such as his asser-
tion that the greatness of a man must be measured
by his capacity to inflict suffering without heeding
the shrieks of the victim. But behind the system of
Nietzsche, immoralist and atheist and destroyer of
all the ancient values of humanity, we find another
system, which is fundamental, whereas the other is
but a superstructure.

Nietzsche proclaims himself an immoralist, and
yet no one has ever sacrificed more in the cause of
morality and truth than the creator of Zarathustra.
Nietzsche's immoralism is the result of a moral
sentiment pushed to excess. Nietzsche attacked the
validity of truth itself — in the name of truth. Yield-
ing to a conscience so scrupulous, so refined, so
delicate, that the least suspicion of intellectual
improbity was insupportable to it, Nietzsche deter-
mined to call in question the value of the supreme
values — the value of truth itself. If we believe in
truth, is it not because we are interested in believing

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 265

in it ? Persuaded that our belief in truth is itself
but the result of accumulated prejudice or passion,
Nietzsche questioned the validity of that belief.
Truth was the instrument with which Nietzsche
sought to destroy our belief in truth ; love of truth
pushed to its farthest limits was the motive which
inspired his attacks.

Nietzsche proclaims himself hard, and in truth he
is hard and cruel, and sympathy is not his failing.
But does his hardness spring from a selfish egoism ?
We have already posed the question and answered
it in the negative. If Nietzsche is hard, and if he
preaches hardness of heart, it is because he sees in
suffering the great means of beautifying life and
strengthening the race ; Nietzsche has ever before
his eyes the spectacle of the race of the future, strong,
confident, joyous, living in beauty. Nietzsche says :
'' Life is in itself without sense. It appertains to us
to give it a sense. But the masses, the inferior races,
are incapable of giving life a sense, for life can be
justified solely as a work of art, it can be justified
solely by the creation of the artist, and the masses
are incapable of creation, and they do but serve and
wait. A strong race is thus necessary in order to
justify life, a race of creators is a fundamental neces-
sity. But it is only when steeled and hardened by
suffering, by great suffering, that that race is capable
of fulfilling its great task, that it is capable of giving
to life a destiny and a value. It is therefore neces-
sary that the masses should toil and suffer and be
exploited, in order that the race of creators, the race
of the Over- Men, may thrive, for through this suffer-
ing and exploitation is the masters' work rendered
possible, and the beauty of the creator will reflect
itself on the whole of humanity, thus giving to the

266 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

masses some slight value which they would otherwise
not possess. Suffering is thus essential to humanity ;
it is necessary as a discipline for the creator, and
through it are beauty and great things realised, and
a value given to all life, which thus finds itself
redeemed, justified and affirmed/'

Nietzsche proclaims himself an immoralist, and
yet this immoralism of the masters is but immoralism
by contrast with the moralism of Christianity, and
which is generally prevalent in Europe to-day, and
it is an immoralism which cloaks a system of morals
lacking nothing in rigidity. It is not the masters
who live in luxury and vice ! Liberated from all
duty towards the masses, towards the pariahs, towards
his inferiors, the master is held down to a strict and
rigid duty towards his equals, inter ares. Those who
regard the immoralism of Nietzsche as a danger
for society, who see in Nietzsche an anarchist, are
much mistaken. For it must always be remembered
that the philosophy of Nietszche is not, and was not
destined to be, a philosophy for humanity. " One
must be superior to humanity through the greatness
of soul, through the great contempt,'' Nietzsche
writes in the preface to the '' Antichrist." The
philosophy of Nietzsche is essentially and exclusively
a philosophy for the few, for the superior elite ; it is
an aristocratic philosophy. And the motto which
inspired Nietzsche was that which Faust had already
proclaimed to be " der Weisheit letzter Schluss " :

'' Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben
Der taglich sie erobern muss."

It is necessary always to keep this motto in mind
when reading Nietzsche ; for it gives the clue to
Zarathustra's conception of the Over-Man.

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 267

What is this conception ? What is the Over-Man ?
In the first place, the Over-Man will be the great
Creator. It is his duty and also his privilege to create
the moral and metaphysical values which give a
meaning to life and to humanity. This is his sacred
duty and his august privilege. The Over-Man alone
it is who is capable of giving to humanity an aim and
an ideal which shall hold good for a thousand years
hence. In the second place, the Over-Man, who
creates in the plenitude of his power the tables of
values for humanity, himself lives, and must neces-
sarily live, beyond and above all systems of morals,
beyond and above all creeds, since it is he who creates
the systems of morals and the creeds which serve
for the use of humanity. But, beyond and above
the morality and the religion of humanity, in general,
the Over-Man has his morality and his religion, which,
if they are beyond and above those of the rest of
humanity, are none the less strict and affirmative and
enthusiastic. The Over-Man is above all things a
Believer. Belief in life, and in the life of beauty and
strength, is his creed, but it is a belief which is
intense, which is enthusiastic, which carries all before
it in the exuberance of its joy. Belief, has said
M. Ferdinand Brunetiere, is inseparable from action ;
and belief, said Nietzsche, is action, and action is
belief.

'* When you raise yourselves above all praise and
blame ; and when your will, the will of one who loves,
desires to command unto all things : this is the origin
of your virtue.

*' When you despise all that which is agreeable,
the soft bed, and when you cannot repose yourself at
too great a distance from the soft bed : this is the
origin of your virtue.

268 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

" When you desire with one unique will, and when
the vicissitudes of fate are recognised as a necessity
by 3^ou : this is the origin of your virtue.

'' In truth, we have here a new good and a new bad !
In truth, it is as the voice, profound and fresh, of a
new source ! '' ^

We see here what, according to Nietzsche, is the
highest possibility to which the will can aspire. That
highest possibility is attained when the will contrives
to give to itself the illusion of being free ; when the
will says to^^itself : " I know I am not free. I know
I am but the agent of Fate, and of an inexorable Fate.
But the universal necessity of all things, both in my
individual life and in the whole order of things —
that universal necessity of which I partake — is willed
by me. That will of mine is but an illusion. But I
will the illusion. And thus illusion and Fate partake,
for me, of my will." In other words, the will over-
steps the sphere of knowledge and partakes of the
illusion by willing the illusion.

But, it may be objected, if the will be but an illusion,
and if the highest possibility of will-power be attained
in the amor fati, that possibility is singularly
narrowed down. What about the famous will of
Power, of which all life is but the manifestation ?
What about the Will of the creator, the will which
shall mark the impress of its seal on the destinies of
humanity for a thousand years ? And here again
we are brought face to face with that great contra-
diction in the doctrine of Nietzsche : the glorification
of the sovereign Will and of the almighty will-power,
on the one hand ; and the philosophy of amor fati,
the resignation in the face of the universal necessity
of all things, on the other. The contradiction between

^"Werke,"vi., Ill, 112.

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 269

the voluntarist and materialist schools, between the
free-will of the metaphysicians and the universal
necessity of the scientist — this contradiction attains
its fullest expression in the philosophy of Nietzsche.

The will of power glorified by Nietzsche is singularly
modified, alike in its extent and in its intensity, by
the amor fati. The will of the creator resolves
itself finally into an acceptance, heroic undoubtedly,
but resigned, of Fate. The religious negation of
Nietzsche, the atheism of him who proclaims every-
where that God is dead — this atheism, does it not also
resolve itself into a religion, a new religion, a religion
beyond and above all the religions ? M. Fouillee
has justly remarked : '' His philosophy is composed
of poetry and mythology ; it resembles in this way
all the myths to which humanity has given birth.
His philosophy is a faith without proof, an unending
chain of aphorisms, of oracles, and of prophecies,
and in this respect it is also a religion. The Anti-
christ of the dying century believed himself to be a
new Christ, superior to the former one.'' ^

For Zarathustra, as we have said, is no mere de-
stroyer. It is true that he pursues everything which
humanity to-day reveres and honours — religion,
science, morality, liberty — ^with a bitter hatred and
relentless sarcasm. Institutions which to humanity
seem sacred, institutions which have, by common
consent, been removed beyond the region of con-
troversy, the most ancient beliefs, the most funda-
mental articles of faith — all are attacked, savagely
and remorselessly, by Zarathustra. But Zarathustra
is not merely the avenging angel of destruction. His
venerable hands are also uplifted in benediction and
from his lips proceed words of joyous affirmation.
^ A. Fouillee : " Nietzsche et rimmoralisme," p. i8i.

270 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

*' O firmament above me, bright and deep !
Light of the world, in contemplating thee I am
inspired by the divine desire !

'' To rise to the heights in which thou art, such is
the depth to which I aspire ! To shelter myself
beneath thy purity, such is my innocence ! . . .

'' Such have we always been ! Our sorrows, our
fears and our aims are common to both of us. The
sun itself is common to both of us.

'' We do not speak, for we know all things. We
remain silent and we communicate what we know
only by smiles. . . .

*' I have a grudge against the passing clouds,
against those wild cats which crawl ; they take
from both of us that which we have in common
— namely, the great and infinite affirmation of all
things.

'* But I bless and I affirm always, provided thou
be around me, pure sky, source of light 1 Then do
I carry down even unto the bottom of the precipices
my joyous affirmation.

'' I am become the one who blesses and who affirms ;
and to become this I have fought long. I was once
a fighter so that I might one day have my hands
free in order to bless.

'' And this is my benediction : to be above all
things, like unto one's own firmament, one's own
round roof, one's own azure bell, and one's own
eternal solitude ; and happy is he who is thus able
to bless.

" For all these things are baptised in eternity's
source, and are beyond everything good and bad ;
and the good and the bad are themselves but fugitive
shadows and passing clouds ! " ^

^ " Werke," vi. 240 ff.

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 271

Above and beyond the religions, Nietzsche
places his religion. God is dead, the belief in God
is no longer permitted to the free spirit, to the Over-
Man. For how could the creator of values, he whose
work the beliefs of humanity are, tolerate a God
above him ! "If there be a God, how comes it that
I am not God ? '' asks Zarathustra. The god of
the Over-Man is himself. He it is who gives to
humanity its faith and its ideals.

The golden house of Nero is gone, and the cross
of wood on which Jesus Christ was stretched nineteen
centuries ago is gone, but above and beyond these
rises the glorious vision of the new religion. A new
religion, such is Zarathustra's cry. The new religion
will not be the religion of humanity, or the religion
of love, or the religion of human suffering — ^it will
be the religion of beauty, and of enthusiastic affirma-
tion of life. The vision of the Over-Man rises before
Zarathustra 's eyes, the vision of him who will break
the old tables of the law, and who will create the new
tables, who will give a new aim and a new value
to all life, who by his strength and his power, and
by the beauty of his works and the grandeur of his
artistic creation, will redeem and sanctify all life in
himself.

And thus does the religion of Zarathustra, above
and beyond all religions, appear as the antithesis,
and also as the complement, of Christianity. Jesus
Christ died to redeem the world ; but he died for
the poor and lowly, the weak and the suffering, for
all those who are weary and are heavy-laden. For
such as these, Zarathustra has no pity, but only con-
tempt. If Jesus Christ died to redeem the world,
it was because the world is bad, because the world is
the refuge of sin and tears, and because only through

272 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

him could humanity be rendered worthy of the other
world, of the world above this, of the world of eternal
felicity. But the Over-Man dies, not to prepare
humanity for the felicity of another world, but to
affirm this present world of ours. The Over-Man
is willing and joyous to undergo every suffering and
every hardship, because this world of ours is beautiful
enough and valuable enough for him to be able to
endure any amount of suffering and hardship. For the
Over-Man, in the overflowing and exuberant vitality
of his soul, suffering and hardship are necessary to
the creation of beauty ; it is necessary that the creator
should be steeled in the school of suffering, that he
should be immersed ever and ever again in the sea
of suffering, so as to prevent him from falling into
that greatest of vices — the vice of softness and
luxurious idleness. Suffering is a result of the over-
flowing richness of his vitality. Out of this over-
flowing richness, he is able to worship suffering, as a
necessity and also as a luxury. For the Over-Man,
the world is redeemed, but it is redeemed by him
and for him, for the Over-Man is the sense and the
aim and the raison-d'etre of life ; and if, on the
one hand, suffering is the redemption of the Over-
Man, on the other hand the Over-Man is the redemp-
tion of the world.

" Dionysus versus the Crucified One : here is the
supreme contrast. It is not a difference in the form
of the martyrdom ; but the difference is in the
meaning of the latter. On the one hand, it is Life
itself, in its eternal fecundity and reconstruction,
which brings with it every torture, and also destruc-
tion and the desire of the nirvana. ... On the other
hand, suffering itself, under the symbol of the ' inno-
cent one crucified,' is made to serve as a protest

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 273

against life, as the formula of its condemnation. One
sees, therefore, that the problem before us is that of
the meaning of suffering : is suffering to be inter-
preted in the Christian or in the tragic sense ? In
the first case, if interpreted in the Christian sense,
suffering is the path which leads to a better and holier
life ; in the second case, life is considered as being
already sufficiently sacred and precious in itself to
be able to justify even the greatest amount of suffer-
ing. The man nursed in the traditions of classical
tragedy says ' yes ' to the m.ost intense suffering.
He is able to do this owing to the greatness of his
strength and of his riches, owing to his powerful
enthusiasm. The Christian says ' no ' to even the
happiest of earthly lives ; he is weak enough, and
miserable and pitiable enough, to suffer from life
under any form. The Christ on the cross is a curse
on life, a warning to us to flee from life ; the muti-
lated body of Dionysus is a glorification of life —
eternally destroyed, it is eternally re-born." ^

Nietzsche is thus in a sense the continuator of the
work of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was the first
great transvaluator of values, according to Nietzsche.
He was the transvaluator of the values of the masters,
of the aristocratic values, which he perverted into the
values of the masses and the rabble. Nietzsche is the
continuator of the work of transvaluation, but in an
opposite sense. Zarathustra's philosophy forms the
complement to the Sermon on the Mount, which it
destroys. Jesus Christ has set the seal of his name
on humanity's destinies for two thousand years.
From the carpenter's shop at Nazareth has proceeded
the greatest revolution which the world has known.
The cross of wood on Calvary was to give mankind

^ " Werke," xv. 290.
s

274 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

an ideal and an aim for two thousand years hence,
it was to engrave itself in the history of the world in
a manner that is indeed '' harder than brass, nobler
than brass/' And Zarathustra has come, as the
best enemy of Jesus Christ, to give to humanity a
new aim and a new ideal, the antithesis of the ideal
set up in the Sermon on the Mount nineteen centuries
ago. The psalms of Zarathustra are to replace the
Beatitudes. Zarathustra has borrowed from the
gospels much of his method. Like Jesus, he has his
disciples, the ''superior men'' of to-day, who, dis-
gusted with life, come to listen to the preaching of
the prophet of the Over-Man. Like Jesus, he in-
stitutes a sort of '' Last Supper," but which, by its
joyousness, forms a startling contrast with the original
one. Like Jesus, he employs the aphorism and the
parable in order to impart his doctrines to his dis-
ciples. The method of prophets is always the same ;
whether it be Konfutze, or Sakya-Muni, or Jesus,
or Mahomet, or Zarathustra, we find the same
features recur.

But whereas Jesus Christ came to preach a trans-
valuation of values on behalf of, and in the interests
of, the inferior races and the slaves, Nietzsche has
sent Zarathustra to preach a transvaluation on behalf
of the masters and the superior race. Thus Jesus
and Zarathustra are both creators of values, but of
totally opposite and antithetical values. Zara-
thustra is constantly reminded of his predecessor,
and he regrets the early death of the latter.

'' In truth, he died too early, this Hebrew who is
honoured by all the preachers of death by slow
means. And it has been a fatality for many since
then, that he died too soon.

*' He had no time to know anything beyond the

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 275

tears and the melancholy peculiar to the Hebrew, and
also the hatred of the good and the just, this Hebrew
Jesus ; and suddenly he was seized with the desire of
death.

" Why did he not remain in the desert, far from
the good and the just ? Perhaps he would then have
learned to live and to love life — and also to laugh !

*' My brethren, believe me, he died too soon ;
himself would have retracted his doctrine, had he
lived to my age ! He was noble enough to be able
thus to retract/'

It is, nevertheless, well to insist again on the fact
that Nietzsche does not seek the annihilation either
of the Christian religion or of morality in general.
Nietzsche merely seeks, and seeks passionately, to
destroy the monopoly of the Christian religion and
of morality. Christianism and the moral law are
indispensable in their proper place. But the sphere
of activity of these two institutions is limited, although
extensive. Christianism and the moral law are
the creations of the inferior races, of the slaves and
the '' bourgeoisie." For the slaves and the '' bour-
geoisie '' they were created, they respond to an
urgent need of these classes, and for these classes
they are in many respects a boon, in other respects
a guarantee of security. But they are creations of
these classes, they are the creations of a race which
is inferior. They are not suitable to the life of the
superior race, they are directly antagonistic to the
development of the masters. But they have attri-
buted to themselves a monopoly to which not only
nothing entitled them, but which is absolutely pre-
judicial to the interests of the superior elements of the
human species. These superior elements are above
and beyond both Christianity and the moral law.

276 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

For these elements, Christianity and the moral law
represent but a means to an end. They are for the
masses an illusion and for the masters a protection.
But Christianity — of which the moral law is but an
emanation — has exceeded its rights ; it has not been
content to exercise its activity in the sphere in which
and for which it was evolved. The notion of con-
science, which was intended as a police agent for
the slaves, as a means of withdrawing their vengeance
from their masters and concentrating it on them-
selves— this notion has been employed to poison the
minds and sap the power of the masters themselves,
by instilling into the latter the insidious poison of
doubt.

Against this monopoly of Christianity, against this
sapping by Christianity of the power of the masters,
Nietzsche's most vehement protests are directed.
But the continued existence of the Christian ideal
among those for whom it was intended, is in every way
desirable ; alike on account of the consolation it
affords to millions who would otherwise lose all hope
and be deprived of every aim ; and on account of
the new ideal which Nietzsche proposes to erect beside
it and above it — for the new ideal can thrive only on
condition that it have an adversary worthy of it.
It is certain that nothing consolidates an ideal so
much as having to defend itself or having to attack.
A people which has no enemies loses consciousness
of its superiority, and it is the same with ideals.
Things thrive by contrast. And it is through the
fight, in the good fight, that Nietzsche's ideal can
alone be consolidated.

The philosophy of Nietzsche is essentially a
revelation of the author's personality. The value of

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 277

Nietzsche lies less in what he says than in what he
is ; or rather it lies primarily in what he is. Nietzsche
never made any pretension to erudition, or to special-
ism. Indeed, such a claim, during the last ten years
of his intellectual life, would have been manifestly
impossible. He had retired from the chair of philo-
logy at Bale in 1879, ^^^ henceforth ceased to keep
himself abreast of philological progress. The state
of his health precluded him from anything like con-
tinued or protracted study, and indeed prevented
him often from any study at all. These periods of
enforced idleness were for Nietzsche of the utmost
value. That Nietzsche himself recognised this, is
clearly shown by his constant references to the beauty
and necessity of solitude, which are always recurring
throughout his writings. During these periods the
mind of the thinker was concentrated on himself ; it
was during these long weary hours of intercourse with
self, of self-introspection, of self-observation, that the
philosophy of Nietzsche was formed. Nietzsche is
essentially a thinker who lives every thought and
every idea. He is indeed the exact antithesis of
those British philosophers whom he so intensely
hated, and who are typical " objective " thinkers.
Professor Brandes has justly remarked in '* Menschen
und Werke,'' of the English utilitarians, that they
are interesting in their work, but not in their per-
sonality. In the work of these British philosophers,
from Bentham to Spencer, abstraction is made of the
personality of the writer. Not so with Nietzsche.
The personality of Nietzsche reads itself in every
line, in every thought. Bold, daring, intrepid, caring
nothing for contradictions or inconsistencies pro-
vided sincerity is obtained, truthful unto heroism,
idealistic to excess — all these qualities shine forth

278 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

in the work of Nietzsche. Judged by the standard
of pure erudition, the value of Nietzsche may be
inconsiderable. It is very doubtful as to whether
Nietzsche's idea of the genealogy of morals, or his
conception of the historical development of Chris-
tianity, or his exposition of the origin of the notions
of sin and conscience, be correct ; his efforts to base
his conception of the two moral systems, that of the
masters and that of the slaves, on a peculiar inter-
pretation of certain adjectives, are undoubtedly vain,
as M. Breal has demonstrated. Quotation is not
a feature of Nietzsche's works. There is no appeal
to authority, no giving of references, no calling
of witnesses. Nietzsche is apodictical in form and
substance. He substitutes the aphorism, trenchant
and brief, for the sustained argument and the
reasoned criticism.

What, then, it may be asked, is the value of
Nietzsche ? If he does not add to our stock of
scientific and philosophical knowledge, what value
does he possess ? And, indeed, we readily recognise
that Nietzsche is not a model to be copied. Like
every great man, like every great thinker, Nietzsche
is a Unique. The method of Nietzsche is suited to
Nietzsche only. It was, indeed, the only method
suitable to him. A man so unlike others, so im-
measurably superior by the depth of his genius and
the delicacy of his sentiment to the immense majority
— such a man cannot be a measure with which we
can measure certain things. Between genius and
erudition may exist a profound difference. The
erudite is the honourable and laborious worker,
thanks to whose efforts the genius can attain to those
divine flashes of inspiration which are as the breath
of all life and which open out to us new horizons of

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 279

infinite possibilities. Shakespeare was no erudite,
nor Goethe, nor Beethoven, nor Wagner — but their
genius has given Hfe a value, and has enriched it and
beautified it and redeemed it.

But to take a genius and propose the methods of
this genius as methods to be followed as a general
rule, would be not only deplorable but monstrously
absurd. It would be equivalent to depriving the
genius of that very inimitable quality by which he is a
genius, and without which he would be as the ordinary
lot of men. Genius has its own methods which,
like genius itself, are inimitable. Nietzsche is a
genius. Every sentence which he writes bears the
impress of genius. And, consequently, it bears also
the impress of an inimitable personality, of a person-
ality which is unique, whose methods are inimitable
and unique like himself.

Nietzsche must thus not be held up as a model.
He is no model, because he is too great to be a model.
Genius is born, not acquired. And those who are
not possessed of genius can but acquire erudition,
which is likewise indispensable to the human species.
It is through erudition that our stock of knowledge
is increased, that our power over the forces of sur-
rounding nature is consolidated, that genius and its
inspiration are rendered possible. Without erudition,
the highest forms of human life would be impossible,
for erudition must precede genius.

It may be objected, again, against Nietzsche, that
he is not the synthetical man, in whom is incarnated
the synthesis of the intellectual, moral, material and
physical progress of an era, and whom he has him-
self held up as the type of the Over-Man. This ob-
jection has much foundation. The Over-Man must
combine the inspiration of the artist with the eru-

280 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

dition of the man of science. Nietzsche is exclusively
an artist and a poet. He has an artist's hatred
for science, and does not perceive all the poetry
of science, all that science contains of profoundly
artistic ! Nietzsche hates erudition, and yet does not
perceive that erudition does not necessarily exclude
genius, although erudition is by no means identical
with genius. But both may co-exist in the same
person, as in the case of Darwin, or in that of Pasteur.
Nietzsche, then, does not add one grain to the stock of
our positive knowledge in any single domain. Neither
does he realise in himself the synthetic type of man,
that type which, while adding itself nothing to the
stock of the world's knowledge, nevertheless incar-
nates the efforts of an era, and constitutes thus one of
the milestones on the road of human progress. What
then is the value of Nietzsche ? Our reply again is :
the value of Nietzsche is in Nietzsche's personality.

And truly this value is great, to our mind. We
see in Nietzsche the most powerful and healthy
of stimuli against materialism, mercantilism, pessim-
ism, socialism, anarchism, pacificism, and against
all the notions of nineteenth-century radicalism in
general. The value of Nietzsche lies in the example
he has given us, and it is a great and healthy ex-
ample, of danger faced and overcome, of conquest over
self, of adventure gladly sought for in the name of
truth, of sincerity and fearlessness and disinterested-
ness. The value of Nietzsche lies also, for us, in the fact
that he is as a breakwater striving to check the rush
of the onflowing tide of democracy and equalisation.

The great and lasting value of Nietzsche is his
idealism. The great adversary of theoretical ideo-
logy was himself the greatest of idealists. Nietzsche
calls upon us to strive after the fulfilment of a great

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 281

ideal. We may like or we may dislike that vision of
the Over-Man which he has held out to us, but the
lesson which we have to learn from Nietzsche is that
no people, no race, no individual, can live without
an ideal. Idealism is the eternal source from which
flow the waters of national as of individual life.
Nietzsche's value lies in that he has brought us face
to face with the deepest and greatest problems.
He has destroyed that fabric of cards which the con-
ventional lies of society have set up. By attacking
with fury and vehemence the most venerated beliefs,
the most sacred notions, which long centuries of
tradition have consecrated, Nietzsche has roused us
from lethargy, he has compelled us to probe ourselves
and our beliefs to the bottom, he has shaken us in
the midst of that dolce far niente begotten of long
and complacent repose. We had begun to look
upon certain notions as fundamental, and this
thought was comforting to us, it dispensed us from
long and wearisome and often perilous researches.
Into this heavy atmosphere, calm and deceiving,
Nietzsche has thrown a bomb. He has forced us
once more to undertake long voyages into unknown
seas, to confront perils which we fondly hoped were
no more. He has shown us that the path which leads
to sanctity and redemption is not the path strewn
with roses, but the path strewn with thorns. It is
not in the silence of the cloister, far from the rattle
and roar of human life, that wisdom is attained ;
but it is in the fight, and through the fight, through
peril confronted and overcome, on the storm-tossed
ocean and in the maze of the virgin forest. '' Live
dangerously," is one of the most admirable mottoes
ever given us, and Nietzsche has given it us.
Nietzsche is the angel, not of peace but of war. He

282 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

has come, not to bring peace on earth, but a sword.
The value of Nietzsche hes in his glorification of
suffering as the means of obtaining the redemption
of life. It is only in the school of suffering, of intense
suffering, that humanity can be steeled to its task.
It is only in such a school that all that is best and
noblest in humanity can be produced, purified and
ennobled by great suffering. The great man, the
creator of values, the Over-Man, he who is at once
the ideal of humanity and its justification — he is the
one who must be most greatly tortured, who must be
broken, burned, bruised and grievously afflicted,
because only through suffering can that one quality
which entitles him above all others to the rank of
Over-Man be brought forth and shine — namely, that
he hold good.

And this glorification of suffering is not merely
theoretical. For Nietzsche knew, better than most
men, the bitterness of distress which comes when
ideals which one has long venerated, and dearly
venerated, are no longer possible. He knew better
than most men the anguish which separation from
beloved friends entails. He knew better than most
men the great loneliness, the sense of utter abandon-
ment, which overtakes all those who live outside their
times. And Nietzsche suffered more intensely be-
cause he felt more intensely. The greatest tortures
are reserved for the most delicate natures.

This rude awakening which Nietzsche has given us,
we need it. It remains eternally true that it is in
suffering and through suffering that all that is great
and lasting can be attained. Those preachers of
modern progress who see in the universal democratic-
isation of humanity, and in the universal equalisation
of man, the signs of progress — these are false pro-

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 283

phets who are themselves the victims of an incurable
lack of vitality, which causes them to see in life a
process which is not worth living, and which urges
them on to try and reduce the trials of life by reducing
its vitality, by reducing its dangers and injustices.
For life is fundamentally and essentially unjust and
immoral. Everywhere in life we see inequality,
everywhere we see the victory go to the strong. And
this elimination of the weak by the strong is a neces-
sary condition of life. Alone in the realm of nature,
man has tried to oppose something, has tried to
oppose his little inventions, to the great law of nature.
Man has invented the moral law and set it in opposi-
tion to the natural law. But the moral law is itself
but the expression of a lack of vitality. The man
who loves life, who loves life, not in spite of its suffer-
ings but because of its sufferings, he who is strong
enough to seek the complete realisation of life's
possibilities, who is prepared to undergo the most
cruel martyrdom in order to realise them — such a
man will be above and beyond all moral laws, which
serve but to hinder and check the integral develop-
ment of his personality.

The value of Nietzsche lies also in that he gives us,
as well as a higher notion of life, a higher notion of
our individual responsibihties and duties. *' No duties
without rights, and no rights without duties,'' says
the democracy. Duty, says Nietzsche, is synony-
mous with right, and our duties increase in the same
measure as our rights, and the only rights we can
legitimately claim are those rights which we have
conquered for ourselves. The Over-Man has his
rights, he has the supreme right of life and death over
the vague masses of humanity ; he has the right to use
humanity as the sculptor uses the shapeless block of

284 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

marble in order to fashion it to his own ends — but the
Over-Man has also the greatest and most onerous and
most perilous of duties : that of giving to humanity
a meaning and an ideal.

The value of Nietzsche lies in the fact that he takes
our eyes away from the sorry spectacle of modern
politics and from the sordid interests of personal gain
and lucre, and fixes them on higher things. In these
days of industrialism, when everything is reckoned
according to the profit or loss which its adoption or
non-adoption may entail, it is good to be able to
refresh oneself at the sources of Zarathustra ; it is
good to be reminded that there are more lasting
interests for humanity than those of commercial
speculation ; it is good to be reminded that there are
higher interests at stake than the fate of rival and
pettifogging States.

The value of Nietzsche lies in his virility, in his
manliness. More viriUty, that is what we want.
And virility can be attained, like everything else that
is precious, only in the school of suffering and through
wars and rumours of war. Virility is a sign of the
great love of life. And Nietzsche, if he had only
preached the love of life, and the joys of life, and
the beauty of life, would have possessed great value.
Nietzsche is a reaction, and a healthy reaction,
against pessimism and nihilism, of which the socialist
ideal, the ideal of the greatest happiness for the
greatest number, is the outcome.

And as a corollary to his magnificent psalms on the
love of life, and the joys of life, and the beauties of
life, Nietzsche possesses a great and lasting value
for the race. The race which lacks virility, and which
looks upon life as an evil ; the race which has lost
confidence in its destiny and which is corroded by an

THE VALUE OF NIETZSCHE 285

existence of luxurious idleness ; the race whose life is
placed in conditions such that life is considered as not
being worthy dying for, as not being worth the
supreme sacrifice ; the race which has lost its faith in a
higher ideal and which regards the greatest happiness
of the greatest number as the only aim to be striven
for — such a race is decadent, such a race is condemned
by reason of its anti-vital instincts, such a race must
infallibly disappear in the universal struggle if another
race, full of faith and strong of will, arise to dispute
its patrimony. Nietzsche's eyes are ever fixed on the
future of the race. His most ardent desire is to see
the development of a race which is strong and con-
fident and joyously afiirmative, a race full of exuber-
ant vitality, the very existence of which shall justify
life and respond to the question so anxiously and so
often asked : '' Wherefore ? "

Thus is Nietzsche great by reason, so to speak, of
the tonicity of his influence. When we have read
Nietzsche we feel better and stronger ; we admire
in him the valiant and unyielding apostle of truth ;
we feel more confident in the destinies of humanity ;
and our hopes, momentarily clouded by the pettiness
of modern life and the sordidness of modern politics,
are augmented and rendered buoyant again when we
reflect that the race is still capable of putting forth
a Nietzsche. Nietzsche has done his task. He has
shown us our defects, and he has shown them with a
heavy and a brutal hand ; he has shown us also the
road to real progress ; and he has, by his vision of the
Over-Man, opened out to us vast new horizons full
of infinite possibilities. His brutality and his heavy
hand are good for us ; they are the only things
capable of awakening us from our torpor. It only
remains to be seen whether the lesson which he has
taught us will be laid to heart.

CONCLUSION

We have seen that the immorahsm of Nietzsche is
but another name for a moraUsm which shall be
beyond and above the moralism of to-day and of
yesterday. Nietzsche is an immoralist when com-
pared with Christ. He has adopted every maxim
which Christianity repudiates, and has reprobated
every maxim which Christianity exalts. In opposi-
tion to the Christian ideal, which is one of love and
sympathy and forgiveness and gentleness, Nietzsche
has preached the gospel of hate and cruelty and hard-
ness of heart. '' Become hard " is the great keynote
of Zarathustra's teaching. But it is a grievous error
to suppose that Nietzsche is '' immoral " in the sense
usually attributed to that word. The egoism of
Nietzsche, we have seen, is dictated in reality by a
conception of altruism far more scientific than the
Christian conception. Egoism is necessary because
egoism is natural, because it is the sole incentive to
every great action, because it is a primordial law,
which causes us to prefer self to non-self. And the
egoism of the masters is dictated by profound reasons ;
sympathy kills him who sympathises, without bring-
ing any relief to the sufferer. Sympathy inspires those
that are strong and happy with mistrust, and causes
them to doubt of their right to happiness and strength
in the presence of so much misery. And yet the
preservation of the strong elements of the race is
essential to the continued existence of humanity.

286

CONCLUSION 287

The strong and the happy must defend themselves
against sympathy as against the most deadly of foes,
for it is upon them, and upon them alone, that the
future of the whole race depends. Nietzsche is not
an egoist whose ideal is the greatest quantity of in-
dividual profit, as he is sometimes represented to be.
Nietzsche is an egoist whose ideal is the life in beauty
and in strength, whose ideal is a race full of exuberant
vitaUty and joyous affirmation ; and because this
ideal can be attained only if we possess hardness
enough to be able to suffer without wincing, and
hardness enough to be able, if necessary, to inflict
suffering without wincing — for this reason is Nietzsche
an egoist, for this reason does Zarathustra write above
us the new table of values : '' Become hard."

And the Over-Man is no '' immoralist " in the
sense usually attributed to the word. No ; he who,
in order to attain the rank of creator, must be broken,
torn, purified with fire and sword, is no immoralist ;
he who, in order to justify himself as a creator of
values, must live '' far from the soft bed of idleness,''
who must live dangerously, who must be ready for
any sacrifice no matter how bitter, is no immoralist.
The enthusiastic prophet of life, he who has blessed
life and affirmed life, and who has held up to us as an
ideal beauty, and ever greater beauty, is no immoral-
ist. To all who would fain be free from all bonds,
and who would attempt to use the name of Zara-
thustra as a pretext for immorality and viciousness,
the question of the prophet is posed, and confronts
them like a blazing torch : frei wozu ?

" Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben,
Der taglich sie erobern muss."

The word '' immoralist " has been incorrectly

288 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

applied to Nietzsche. Himself, in order to emphasise
the contradiction between his doctrine, all impreg-
nated with classical tradition, and modern ideas,
declared himself to be an immoralist. But the word
was misused. In truth never has a moralist existed
so profoundly sincere as Nietzsche. His passionate
love of truth at all costs, his hatred of all lies and
insincerity and conventionalism, are manifest in
every sentence of his works, as in every act of his life.
His philosophy has not ended in im^moralism. The
result of his philosophy is to establish a line of
demarcation between one system of morals confined
to the very few — the system of the masters — and
another system for the masses — the system of the
slaves. The morals of the masters are severe, and
of iron severity. The master must be worthy of his
task, he must be steeled to his task. His task in
itself — does not one understand it ? — is itself the most
iron moral law, for it is the giving of an aim and an
ideal to humanity for a thousand years. But he who
has, along with so terrible and august a task, so
terrible a responsibility, he is necessarily of stronger
stuff than those for whom he creates ; and he is not
subject to the same rules as these ; and along with
the values which he creates for humanity he creates
his values for himself.

Thus does the immoralism of Nietzsche resolve
itself into the strictest moralism. And in the same
way the atheism of Nietzsche resolves itself into a
faith which is as a burning flame, and which glows like
the evening star in the pale azure sky. The faith of
Zarathustra — faith in life, faith in the infinite pos-
sibilities of life — is a faith which shall remove
mountains. And Nietzsche does here but confirm
a law which we witness everywhere in operation,

CONCLUSION 289

a law observed by a careful study of social life and
social phenomena the world over — namely, that
religion, under one form or another, is a sociological
necessity. We have no single instance, either in
practice or in theory, of a society without religion.
Religion does not necessarily imply belief in an
anthropomorphic deity. Religion means the belief
of a community, belief in a common ideal, based
on identity of interests. Those philosophies and
popular movements most hostile, in appearance, to
religion, were all based on a religious or metaphysical
belief. Would the French Revolution ever have
accomplished its purpose if, above and beyond its
crimes and follies, be3^ond the smoke of the Bastille
and the blood of the September massacres, the belief
in the universal fraternity of man and in the possi-
bility of a better life under better conditions had not
actuated its leaders ? The founder of that philosophy
of the nineteenth century which was destined to
supplant all religions, and to rise superior to all
religions, Auguste Comte, the founder of the Positivist
philosophy itself, ended by proclaiming, in default
of another, the religion of humanity. Socialists and
anarchists of to-day, they who wage war on religion
and urge the destruction of all religion — they too, they
have their religion, and a reUgion which yields to
none in the spirit of sacrifice and devotion which it
calls forth in its adherents, a religion which has its
martyrs to a cause which they believed to be sacred,
like the poor and uneducated communard who,
mortally wounded at the barricades, replied when
asked for what he was dying : '' Pour la soUdarite
humaine.'' And every cause, whether great or small,
whether heroic or ignoble, whether right or wrong,
must be based on belief. The want of belief is among

290 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

the most fundamental of human wants ; for behef is
necessary to action, and action is necessary to Hfe.

The rehgion of Nietzsche is the reUgion of life.
And for Nietzsche life is synonymous with beauty
and power. And the life which is Nietzsche's ideal
is the life in beauty, in ever greater beauty, in ever
greater strength and power. Zarathustra has gathered
round him in his hut in the mountains a few disciples,
among whom is the Most Hideous of Men, he who
represents all the woes and tears and sufferings of
humanity, he who has slain God by the very hideous-
ness of his sores. And Zarathustra exposes to these
his gospel of beauty, his ideal of the Over-Man, his
vision of life as it should be, as it can be, his vision of
life redeemed, of life sanctified and glorified by the
Over-Man. When Zarathustra has finished his lyric
poem, it is the Most Hideous of Men, the repre-
sentative of everything which life contains most
supremely ugly, who speaks first :

** And meanwhile all of them, one after another,
had come out into the fresh air and the cool calm
night ; Zarathustra himself led the Most Hideous of
Men by the hand, so that he might show him the
beauties of the night and the big round moon and
the silvery waterfall by his retreat. There they at
last stood silent together, all these old men, but their
heart was comforted and full of courage, and they
wondered secretly that it could be so pleasant on
earth ; but the stillness of the night pressed ever
more deeply upon them. And again Zarathustra
thought to himself : ' Oh, how they do please me,
these superior men ' ; but he did not give expression
to his thought, for he respected their happiness and
their silence.

*' But then happened the most astonishing event

CONCLUSION 291

of that long and astonishing day ; the Most Hideous
of Men began once more, and for the last time, to
gurgle and to stutter, and when at last he succeeded
in speaking, behold ! there proceeded a question,
clear and decided, from his lips, a clear, profound
question, which moved all those who stood by.

'' ' My friends, said the Most Hideous of Men, what
think you ? For the sake of this one day — I am for
the first time satisfied that I have lived my life.

'' ' And that I do thus bear witness, is not yet
enough for me. It is good to live on earth. One day,
one festivity with Zarathustra, have taught me to love
the world.

'' ' Was this—Uie ? ' will I ask of Death. ' Then
— again ! '

*' ' My friends, what think you ? Will you not say
unto Death even as I have said : ' Was this — Life ?
For the love of Zarathustra, then, once more ! ' *' ^

It is the great victory. The religion of Life has
triumphed. Zarathustra has not preached in vain.
Life is redeemed, life is sanctified by the Over-Man,
supreme type of human possibility. Zarathustra
has taught the Most Hideous of Men to love life, to
love life as incarnated in the Over-Man. And, under
the impression caused by this confession of the Most
Hideous of Men, of him who has slain God, the
assembled little group of disciples to whom Zara-
thustra has revealed his secret, break forth into
that exquisite song, sung to the accompaniment of
the church bell ringing in the solemn hour of mid-
night, the hour which marks the end of the old day,
and the dawn of the new :

" Eins !
Oh Mensch ! Gieb Acht !

^ " Werke/' vi. 461-462.

292 THE PHILOSOPHY OF NIETZSCHE

Zwei!

Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht ?

Dreil
' Ich schlief , ich schlief —

Vierl
Aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwacht : —

Fiinf !
Die Welt isttief,

Sechs !
Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.

Sieben 1
Tief ist ihr Weh, —

Acht !
Lust — tiefer noch als Herzeleid,

Neun !
Weh spricht : Vergeh !

Zehn!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit —

Elf!
— Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit ! '

Zwolf I " 1

' " One !
O Man 1 Give heed !

Two !
What saith the midnight deep ?

Three !
* I slept in sleep —

Four !
From deepest dream I wake ;

Five !
The world is deep.

Six!
And deeper than the day can know.

Seven !
Deep is its woe —

Eight !
Joy — deeper than affliction still.

Nine !
Woe saith : Begone !

Ten!
But all Joy wills Eternity —

Eleven !
Wills deep, profound Eternity ! '

Twelve ! "

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